Whatever happened to the language lab?
As a language teacher (amongst other things), I often hark back to when I was at 6th form, studying French, German and Spanish, using what seemed like incredible technology.
For those who don't have the luxury of remembering that far back, there we'd all sit, around 25 of us in a language lab with our individual booths and headphones. The teacher had readied a recording for us to listen to and around came a worksheet of questions.
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| Language listening in the 90s |
The teacher had overall control of the cassette decks (yes cassette decks) and could stop us to talk to us at any point but we as students had control of how many times we heard the recording, we could pause for thought and rewind to listen to certain points without affecting our classmates at all.
Total autonomy and differentiation way back in the 90s.
I found this an effective and engaging way of developing my language listening skills and this continued at university.
However, when I came into teaching in secondary schools in the late 90s, very few schools had the luxury of a purpose built language lab with all this technology. Most schools had portable cassette players that the teacher carried to class and then had to fumble around finding the right place on the tape (as they were normally shared across the department).
The very lucky departments may have had several of these and headphones to plug in to the 6 headphone jacks. In this way groups of students could listen to different material BUT those 6 still had to listen at the same speed as the rest of their group. Not ideal!
Then something dawned on me a few weeks ago and I can believe it took that long really....
Could we recreate a similar language lab environment using edtech and G Suite for Education?
Here's my suggestion. It's not perfect by any means but it's food for thought certainly!
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| Click here for a demo |
By using Google Slides as a base, uploading target language Youtube videos, creating questions in Google Slides or Forms and sharing to classroom you could recreate this kind of language lab experience with complete autonomy for the individual student.
I'd be keen to know what others have done. Get in touch.
well Joe, Google Forms also offers this selfcontrolled possibility of embedding a youtube video with maybe not all the varieties in questions you would like to see, but, on the other hand, they are (can be) auto-corrected.
ReplyDeleteEdPuzzle also offers a great range of listening activities and it stretches further than YouTube videos.
Book Widgets combines quite some of all these elements and it can be a copy of the book per student as well.
Surely there are more options, but these are ....my 2 cents worth for the time being
We've got plans to trial something like this in the summer. Kaizena now works within Google Docs, so we're toying with the idea of creating a worksheet in a Google Doc. The words "Question 1" will be a hyperlink to a sound clip of the question in French. The words "Answer 1" will be highlighted by the student and a voice comment using Kaizena will be inserted by them as a response. It's just an idea at the moment but we're going to experiment...
ReplyDeleteSounds great Sachin, keep us posted.
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