Language teaching software

English language labs are the hipsters of the digital classroom, bringing tech into ed before edtech was even a thing. With all the talk about current technology and what the future can bring, we sometimes forget to look to the past.

Language labs were an idea ahead of their time, succeeding despite hardware glitches and technological limits. English educators can—and do—still use English language labs physical or virtual in the classroom to help students improve and practice their listening comprehension and speaking skills.

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. Language labs are audio and audio-visual systems that help students learn new languages through listening and speaking.

In their heyday, old-school language labs required hardware to be set up in classrooms. The teacher occupied one master console while students sat at booths with mics. The teacher fed students educational content through a cassette-based system remember cassettes? Language labs were meant to be used in a classroom setting. Though they are mostly relics of the past, some institutions still use them today. These technological marvels date back to the s with some existing even earlier than that when the idea that rote memorization and repetition were the best methods for learning new languages.

They remained popular through the s even while more advanced technology and a shifting educational landscape rendered them nearly obsolete. Somehow, they survived. The spirit of the language lab lives on and there are numerous modern options available for classrooms around the world—with a few tweaks and upgrades, of course.

Now you are ready to explore the world of English language labs. Here is a collection of modern language labs and alternatives to give you a taste of what to expect. Best for: Anyone! WizIQ Course Builder is an easy way to upload your course content and create a customized learning portal for your language school. Simply log in, create an account, upload content and categorize it into sections and chapters to build self-paced language courses. To maintain your branding in your online course, you can add your logo and change the theme color of your WizIQ language learning portal.

Real-time collaboration is the essence of efficient teaching, and with WizIQ software for language school, you remain in constant touch with your students with its live sharing options. Tests help you assess the progress of your learners and the success of your course and with WizIQ, you can create 32 different types of online text-based and multimedia tests with just a single click. Setting up an online course and handling payments offline makes the payment process difficult for remotely located students and is difficult to manage as the size of your batch increases.

Teach live classes, have face-to-face interactions with your learners and create self-paced multimedia courses with WizIQ language teaching software. Audio-visual interaction. Real time collaboration. Multi-lingual format. Online whiteboard. Replicate the physical classroom experience with an advanced and feature-rich online whiteboard. Self-paced language courses.

Integrated payment gateway. Advantages of teaching language online The most appealing advantage of teaching language online is the sheer reduction in the cost of operating the business. You can simply replicate the classroom experience at a lower cost with a language teaching software. You can view and manage enrollment data, class schedules, attendance reports and course-related analytics with auto-generated reports without spending resources on data entry.

You can promote the courses offered by your language school to students across the world with multilingual support and online payment gateway. Cloud-based language teaching software comes with unlimited capacity giving you the option to scale as much as you want as the number of students increases.

These videos are also carefully annotated for students. Words come with example sentences and definitions. Students will be able to add them to their own vocab lists, and even see how the words are used in other videos. In this automated scrabble-like game, students spell out words for points adhering to certain parameters. A fun way to integrate this game into the classroom is by holding a Words With Friends championship.

Have students play with each other in several rounds; the student with the highest score move on to the next round and eventually become the Words With Friends classroom champion.

Quite an engaging way to practice spelling and vocab! Evernote is primarily helpful with organizing language course content digitally.

From planning a course, to delivering a lesson plan and to capturing feedback after class before, during and after! T ags are a great way to structure your classes weekly or by class. During class you can share a digital notebook with your students: After you create it, it uploads automatically to their Evernote app.

You can also do whiteboard photos by taking snapshots of the whiteboard and uploading them for later use. Take a pic of the whiteboard before and after class for an accurate time-stamped snapshot of what you were working on, on any given class day. After class you can streamline grading by scanning graded tests, including scantrons, and add them to Evernote.

You can then enter them into your in-app spreadsheet when you have time. Educators can redact a quiz, upload it to the app for students to take on their their phones or tablets.

The structure is already conveniently in place for multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank. All they need to do is enter the in-app code specific to that quiz. It seems like students are loving it too! The most convenient way to use it is to create multiple-choice questions before class starts. You ask a question and students raise the answer in the air with their cards.

We can then project the class responses graph-mode is most useful here on the whiteboard so students get an idea too. This is the simplest, yet arguably most practical and useful of all the apps here. It fixes a common classroom problem. So what do we do in the face of their blind stares? Talk about environmental friendliness and convenience; with the app open, just tap or shake the screen to randomly assign a student to answer.

The app is smart, in that it learns to link students to the questions most fitting to their name and aptitude with time and use. Sick of passing around an attendance sheet everyday for every class? This is a great opportunity to go paperless, particularly with classroom management.

The app is more than a digital class record.