I’ve used a lot of tech tools over the years to record English Language Learners speaking, whether to record stop action videos of word definitions (see The Best Resources For Learning To Use The Video Apps “Vine” & Instagram), or, more often, to describe images or practice dialogues (see The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English).

Unfortunately, though, most of those tools over the year have now either gone out of business or have made themselves more difficult to share publicly (or privately) on the Web.

This year, I was trying to figure out a new alternative and decided to try the Adobe Spark app.  I’ve had students use it over the years on the web, but our district firewall and old technology had often made it difficult to record.  But the phone app was a different story.  After putting out a query on Twitter, many teachers quickly affirmed that choice.

We’re learning about the seasons, and students had to complete this form about the seasons in their home country.  It included drawing an image about what happens during that season, and they had to write sentences describing their image.

While they were doing the project, a peer tutor took them outside to take a photo of one of their pictures and have them practice saying their sentences. It was easy to add the image from the phone’s camera roll to the app and have them record their voice.  Students loved it, the process was super-quick, and it was easy and fast to upload the videos to show to the class.

Here’s an example of one (shared with permission):

I’m not aware of another app that accomplishes what I want so easily (and at no charge). We’ll be using it a lot this year! And, since it’s from Adobe, I don’t expect it to go defunct anytime soon.

I’m adding this post to The “All-Time” Best 2.0 Tools For Beginning English Language Learners.