Guest post by Marina Petrovic, Online English and Serbian teacher

I’ve been teaching languages online since 2008. You may imagine that I have tried out a myriad of different tools since my first online lesson! However, in time I learnt to stick to the ones which are extremely simple to use and to which my students respond best. So far these have been the following platforms and tools:

For synchronous teaching:

• Skype/FB
  After working with various virtual classrooms for years, starting with ancient DimDim and then pricey AdobeConnect and popular WizIQ, I ended up using Vyew. Its uniqueness dazzled me, until dozens of my virtual classrooms and years of course creation disappeared overnight. I wish I hadn’t spent so much time, effort and money while Skype and Google doc have always been there for me: the most reliable ones and free!

For synchronous and asynchronous teaching:

• Google documents
  Of course, Skype along with Google doc! Another great tool that has patiently been waiting for me to discover it! It allows both you and your students to follow the changes to the document in the real time. There is also a chat available along with other addons.<
  Once the lesson is over, my students do their homework when they have time, add it in the form of a comment and I get an instant notification into my Gmail inbox. I reply to them instantly and this allows a continuous flow. How cool is that!

For asynchronous teaching:

• Blogger and Facebook page for sharing content
  Blogger is the simplest form of blog I would advise teachers to use. It looks neat and trendy, and yet you needn’t worry about many technical details, especially in comparison to WordPress. There is nothing to install, nor to update. My free blog on blogger.com platform has more than 80k unique visitors a month. I keep sharing the numerous posts I create there through Facebook and Twitter as well. Many of my online students get in touch with me for the first time through my FB page or comments on the blog.
• Youtube for publishing my videos
  Fifty percent of the traffic I attract to my website comes from my Youtube videos. They are embedded into my own posts. That is why I managed to create a kind of a LMS with my blog and Youtube. I simply add a link into my Youtube video lesson which leads to a language quiz which is based on my video lesson. Most of my students tell me they feel happy to be able to use platforms such as  Youtube, Facebook and Blogger to do the tasks  and listen to my video lessons. There is nothing complicated about that!
• Embeddable quizzes for practicing various language skills.
  Let me explain to you how you can add  a quiz to your blog and change it within minutes!
  

  As you have seen here, the most important steps are as follows:

  1. Logging into your Learnclick account
  2. Naming your quiz
  3. Adding a category
  4. Deciding on the number of attempts and quiz timing
  5. Adding a text
  6. Creating gaps
  7. Making your quiz visible to everyone
  8. Saving the quiz
  9. Clicking “show quiz” in order to check what it looks like and if everything is correct
  10. Clicking on “change”, next to Visible to in order to get an embed code
  11. Grabbing the embed code
  12. Pasting the code into your blog or websiteIt’s that simple!

• Padlet for writing exercises
  This is another fun tool which proved to be reliable and attractive to my students. They easily access a Padlet page with my video lesson, click twice and write whatever I instruct them to practice. I guess it is also fun for them to see that there has been a continuous flow of messages for a few years. Students of various ages and backgrounds from the whole region of ex-Yu have been learning together –  check it out on this padlet.
• Vocaroo.com for speaking exercises
  The quickest way to leave a message for someone and relax knowing that it will be erased in a month or so. No need to sign up, sign in – just allow the platform to use your mic, record the speaking task and send your teacher the link. My students keep sending me their speaking exercises though their own Google docs or FB messages. I listen to them and reply within a day. This is an indispensable tool for all language teachers out there!

I hope you enjoyed learning how I perfected my online teaching in years while downsizing the number of tools and platforms. In the course of the last year I made my dream come true and switched to teaching online completely. Of course, more than twenty years of F2F teaching helped a great deal 😉

I would like to invite you to share your online teaching experiences, your blogs and your favourite tools! If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments below.

For learning Korean I like to create cloze dictation quizzes as I love the idea of learning in context. In this article I will explain to you how this can be done with learnclick.com.

• I click on “Create a Quiz” and then choose the first option “Blank Boxes & Dropdowns” from the dropdown list and click “Add Question”.
• Then I paste my text into the Learnclick textbox. For the words or short phrases I want to learn I mark them and click on “Create Gap” .

The articles that I use come from an ebook I bought from talktomeinkorean.com and it contains the English translations.

“Talk to me in Korean” has the above article also available as a video on Youtube. I only want to include the audio into my quiz, so I copy the Youtube vIdeo URL and head to convert2mp3.net to convert the video into an mp3-file (you can find the Youtube link when you click on “Share” below the Youtube video).

• I make sure I can see the formatting options:
  
• Then I click on the icon to add a a multimedia element:
• I choose the type “audio” and click on the symbol next to textfield for File/URL to upload my mp3 file.
  
  
• After uploading the file, I click on the “Advanced” tab and choose “Don’t preload” and check “Controls”.
  
• After clicking on the button “Create” in the multimedia dialog, it will insert the audio file inside our textbox. In the edit mode it will only display a yellow box. You will get to see the actual audio controls once you display the quiz.
  
• This is how my dictation quiz displays after I click on the button “Show Quiz”:
  

This is a dictation quiz one of our users created: https://www.learnclick.com/quiz/show/16238

We’ve heard from many people that they are facing the problem with many quiz creators that they can’t do right-to-left quiz questions. Learnclick solves this now. We added the symbol right-to-left:

This works for gap-filling questions, as well as drag & drop, dropdowns, etc.

If something doesn’t work as expected, please let us know. We’d be happy to improve this or help you.

Teachers have told us that www.learnclick.com is the best cloze test maker that they have found. What makes it superior to other cloze test creators?

Here is a list of features that make learnclick.com stand out:

• You can do more than just creating cloze tests: you can also add multiple choice, drag & drop, dropdown and essay questions -> see here
• Lots of flexibility: multiple answers can be correct, you can add a hint and special chars -> see here
• Do your own formatting, insert pictures and audio.
• Great for assessments, as you get a detailed overview of the submitted answers.

And lots of other features that will simplify your life as a teacher. Oh, and did we mention that it’s very easy to use? Go to www.learnclick.com and login with demo/demo123 to test it out.

We recently got this great feedback from a customer:

“My daughter is in 5th grade has ADHD, learning disabilities, and she is a visual learner. So I take her study guides from school and make Drop and Drag tests and sometimes multiple-choice quizzes. She loves the Drop/Drag tests and does them twice daily to study. Since I began using your site, it is rare that my daughter gets below a B on a Science or Social Studies test.” Susan A.

As you can see from this feedback, quizzes can be used by Mums and Dads for supplementing their kids’ school curriculum. These online quizzes also help kids with short-term memory problems. The students benefit from online quizzes because they can do quick repetitions on their tablets every single day. Visual learners benefit, too, by seeing the material on their screens. Kids are so used to screen time, so learning on it seems more natural and fun.

Parents can initially make up the quizzes from study guides to reinforce school learning. By middle school, kids with learning disabilities/ADHD should be making the quizzes up themselves to reinforce the learning.

Go to www.learnclick.com to start creating your own drag & drop quizzes.