EdTech Essentials: 5 Language Teachers Share Their Top Tools

In today’s age, everyone is shifting towards a more cultural and social-oriented approach. This is causing more and more people to learn new languages. These languages are highly beneficial, and they help in dealing with international clients, and they help improve connections with business partners across the world.

Having a good grasp of languages can be very beneficial. We sat down with five language teachers to ask them about the tools they usually use to help teach and build language skills in their students. All of them swear by the chosen tools and say that they are very beneficial in incorporating a new language into a student’s routine and helping them understand it better. Here are some great digital language tools you should try.

Best EdTech Solutions Educators Love

• Quizlet

Quizlet is perhaps one of the most famous and commonly used tools used for teaching language. It helps you correlate a new language with the one you already know to help you understand it better. Usually, teachers will create fun interactive quizzes for students to learn from and enjoy.

Read More: 6 Most Powerful Tech Tools for the Foreign Language Classroom

This makes the student understand the language structure and sentence formation better. Quizlet also comes with many different games that help build one’s vocabulary and use visual pictures and videos for more engaging learning.

This app helps in forming the basic foundation of a language using the simple question and answer technique. Teachers and students both enjoy this tool since it makes the work fun and easy for both. This tool also helps the student understand the nature of the language and the places where it is spoken fluently. This also sets interesting challenges for students who are expected to finish a different set of games within a time limit to test their knowledge and fluency. All in all, this is one of the best tools in language learning. 

• Google Tour Creator

As the name suggests, Google Tour Creator is a tool used for creating virtual tours, allowing for immersive and interactive online travel experiences. Numerous teachers have pointed out its benefits and the various ways that this tool comes in handy during language learning:

1. It allows teachers to create virtual tours and sightseeing experiences for their students. As a result, this helps in getting students interested in culture and local language alike.
2. This tool allows students to see various famous places without leaving their homes. It also helps them get real audio and video guides throughout the tour.
3. Google Tour Creator provides equal learning opportunities to people all over the world.
4. It allows to digitally unite students and create a welcoming, personalized, and inclusive online learning environment.

This tool is also very immersive, and it helps the student feel closer to the region where the language is originally from. In addition, it helps increase students’ interest in language learning.

3. Pear Deck

This is a tool that might not have a direct language learning impact. This is a tool primarily used in articulating different designs and pictures into Google slides. It helps in making the lesson attractive and visually appealing, which causes the student to pay more attention to their lessons, while the teachers can explain the exact meaning and usage of the words better using visual elements. This tool has many exciting features and elements that can make learning more accessible and fun. 

4. Flipgrid

This is a tool that is used predominantly for video creation. Teachers use this tool to ask their students to make videos in a target language for someone or about something they wish to discuss in class. This tool allows students to talk to other students, view their videos, and share their opinions.

There are times when teachers partner up with international schools that speak the target language and ask their students to exchange video messages with those students. This exercise lets the students rapidly progress in a chosen language, making learning very exciting and rewarding.

5. Quill

No language classroom can exist without writing. Quill can make writing assignments more easy and manageable for students. It is a time-tested solution that can help students conduct their own grammar checks and proofread their papers before submission. This tool is helpful for teachers, too, as it allows them to hold lessons for an entire class where they can instruct students and share writing tips. It is an excellent solution for personalized learning and tracking individual student achievements.

Those students who struggle with writing and translation assignments for their language class can use certified translation service to make learning a bit more manageable.

Conclusion 

These are some of the most valuable and widely used tools that teachers use to help make their students understand the language better and develop an interest in learning it. These tools create an immersive and interesting experience for the students, making language learning more creative and personalized. Such tools are the modern way of assisting students to gain a better understanding of the language, as well as test and measure the student’s knowledge. Give some of them a try and see your educational process transform!