I use Flipgrid to help my students get practice creating with the language and rehearsing their presentational speaking skills. I can write or record a prompt at the top, which could be in the form of a video that I create or one that I pull from another site. Students can then record themselves answering questions, describing a picture, telling a story, introducing themselves, demonstrating a skill, doing a tutorial, acting as a historic figure, showing and telling, or asking their own questions that their classmates then have to answer. The possibilities are pretty open. I like the fact that others can also comment on their videos and I can give feedback from my dashboard in a very intuitive way. Students can also create their own Flipgrids for their classmates and they like being able to decorate their picture with doodles and stickers. The best part is that Flipgrid is free for all educators, so you can create as many of them as you want.

Padlet is a very useful online bulletin board app. Students can easily add images, videos, and text and manipulate them around the board however they would like. They can take notes, create a timeline, make a picture dictionary, tell a story with pictures, collaborate on a project, elicit feedback from others, and anything else that requires the curation of information. It can be helpful for brainstorming, making word clouds or organizing lots of different information. The example here shows a student’s telling of the story of Little Red Riding Hood with her own images. Students enjoy the visual nature of it and how it lets them be creative with images. I have had students create an introductory Padlet,  family tree of their own family or of a famous family, or make a picture dictionary to learn new words. The free version allows you up to 5 Padlets. The paid version starts at $12

Use Google Tour Builder to take students on a tour of anyplace on the globe. You can insert pictures, videos, and text that are linked to a pin you can drop on any location on Earth. You or your students can create a trip with images and texts about what to see and do in different cities in the target culture. Like anything Google, it is easy to collaborate on, so students can work in groups to complete a project. You can also create a webquest where students follow a tour to get info from the pictures. You can ask questions in the target language or have the students use street view to “walk around” in a different city and describe what they see.

This website tells classic stories such as Jack and the Beanstalk, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, and Little Red Riding Hood in the target language. Stories are written in Spanish, Italian, French, German, and English, and you can play slow audio spoken by native speakers. This resource allows foreign language teachers to provide comprehensible input through audio recordings, and through pictures. I have used this resource to help students learn to pick out cognates and to use context clues while reading in the target language. The website also allows the option to translate every paragraph to English after you read it once.

Gimkit is an interactive website similar to Kahoot or Quizlet, but it was made by a high school student. The goal of this particular student was to provide a more engaging review tool. It is an effective resource for reviewing vocabulary. Once students sign in and the game has begun, students are given question after question as fast as they can answer. This way students stay engaged and don’t have to wait on others. Students especially enjoy Gimkit because it involves strategy such as buying upgrades and “freezing” other players. Use of Gimkit can be designed in order to keep instruction in the target language. Instead of having English on one side of the flashcard, you can use a picture or a TL question.

Señor Ashby’s “Locura De Marzo” is a competition similar to the NCAA’s March Madness Tournament. At the beginning of March, there are sixteen Spanish music videos on the Señor Ashby website. Each day in class you watch two music videos in the target language, and the students vote one of the songs on to the next round. This activity is especially helpful for teaching about different cultures. In my class, we take a look at the band or singer, read some of the more important lyrics, and we make predictions following the first round. While this takes place at the beginning of March on the website, it could be done in any language classroom. You simply need to find 8 or 16 songs in the target language and create a bracket.