Sunday, May 29, 2011

Exploring Videos Series - EnglishCentral

I've used EnglishCentral with my online group, English4Travel.
The feedback was very positive, for students can watch videos in English related to topics of interest, they can decide for the level - easy, medium, hard - and they can record themselves to evaluate their oral production. They can watch the videos with transcripts and without them for a more challenging activity. Fantastic tool for the classroom and beyond.

On the teacher's side, you have the option to create a student group and check your students' progress, which videos they've watched and their scores, plus I just love the feature in which you aggregate the videos by topic and suggest them to the group.

EnglishCentral has also been interested in updating the system with new features for the users. Really worth giving it a try with your students.

2 comments:

  1. Carla,

    Thanks so much for writing a post about this. I've been involved on many levels with the building of EnglishCentral and I'm involved because "they get it". Truly something that clicks with students and glad you found out too.

    We are busy really developing much better assignment and reporting tools, that is the major thing. Also, to give you a scoop - EnglishCentral will become more like a video corpus accessible to teachers. That's its major strength, this huge google library of videos and we'll be allowing teachers to dip in and pull up video clips of words/idioms/grammar etc... that's exciting too.

    Again, thanks and any questions, teachers can contact me at david@englishcentral.com

    David

    ReplyDelete
  2. Fantastic to hear that, David. I'm a huge English Central fan, and I've been spreading the word about it to teachers and students, for I really like the quality of the videos and the types of oral production practice.

    A video corpus? That's truly exciting!

    ReplyDelete

Conversations are sparklers for deepening thoughts and maturing ideas. Share, connect, leave a comment. I'd love to hear from you. To follow up on the comments here, click on the "subscribe via email" below the comment box, on the right.