thisisprabha / Pixabay

 

I’ve previously shared the tools I’m having my English Language Learners use to develop their language skills (see Here’s The Revised Online Teaching Plan I Hope To Implement Next Week and HERE’S MY ONLINE TEACHING PLAN IF OUR SCHOOL CLOSES DOWN BECAUSE OF THE CORONAVIRUS).

Brainpop ELL, Duolingo and USA Learns are the primary sites I’m having students work on for thirty minutes a day of independent practice (their choice about which ones they work on, and they also have other choices of sites like Raz-Kids).  That thirty minutes is combined with thirty minutes each day of live instruction that we’re doing online.  All three allow teachers to create virtual classroom and monitor student progress.  Duolingo and USA Learns are always free, and Brainpop is making their platform free during the school closure crisis.

Several other language-learning sites have made their features free for students and teachers until the end of the school year.  I learned some through a Fast Company article.

Most of these tools, like Duolingo, can be used with students learning various languages, including Spanish.  Some allow teachers to create virtual classrooms.  Others will only be useful to the most motivated students, since they don’t allow teachers to see what students have done.  But they are all worth knowing about investigating if they could work for your remote learning situations.

Here they are (with what I think are the best ones first):

Mango Languages is clearly the top one in the group for all teachers.  It has self-paced courses for seventy classes, and lets teachers create virtual classrooms.  And, like the rest of these sites, it’s free until the end of the school year.

However, if you teach Spanish (it also provides instruction in a few other languages, Conjuguemos might be your best bet. It, too, lets you create a virtual classroom.

iCulture looks like a very engaging tool for teaching Spanish and other languages. It, of course, is also free right now. If you look at the introductory video, it shows that students do indeed do work that they submit to the teacher, but it’s not clear -to me, at least – if there’s a virtual classroom or if they email it to the teacher.

Two other sites have made their platforms free to students, but there does not appear to be any way that teachers can monitor the work they do. These two are Babbel and Rosetta Stone.

The Fable Cottage is the last site on this list. It offers multilingual video stories. It seems to me that, in terms of what’s going on now, it might or might not be useful to use if you are teaching a live class.

 

I’m adding this post to The “Best Of The Best” Resources To Support Teachers Dealing With School Closures.