Idea # 1

© Timothy Takemoto via Flickr

If you ever taught a foreign language, you know how challenging listening can be for students. I found that books on a general ability to listen are surprisingly helpful to address this question: for instance, "Listening Comprehension? What's that?" by Cynthia Banks and "Listening: The Forgotten Skill: A Self-Teaching Guide" by Madelyn Burley-Allen. Although these books are meant for people who want to become good listeners in their first language, many strategies from are perfectly applicable for foreign language learners.

Strategies are great, but everyone can use a bit of practice, or actually - a lot of it. Since it's difficult to deal with authentic audio materials on the beginner level and textbook stuff mostly sucks (at least, in Russian), I decided to spice things up and start a podcast channel. Using an audio social network called AudioBoom I share stories, talk about local news and interview my fellow teachers - all within 10 minutes recordings. Students listen to the episodes that come out every few days and respond in comments. The easiest way to set up your own channel like that is to sign up with AudioBoom (it's free) and ask your kids to follow you.

What is exactly AudioBoom? It's a very user-friendly platform that allows you to broadcast any audio content as long as it fits the 10 minute limit (you have to pay for more time). There is also an app! Just like you, your students can create audio clips and send them to you and each other via AudioBoom messages or upload on their channels. Before, AudioBoom (it's used to be AudioBoo) had this wonderful feature, when users could actually leave a voice comment to your audio clip. Unfortunately, this feature is not available anymore, but you can always ask students to send you their audio responds via messages.

I usually use the description portion of the post to write a question or a task to make listening more purposeful. You can also use this space for giving a vocabulary list.

If you are already using AudioBoom with your students, I would looooove to know, what you are, guys, doing with it. Otherwise, feel free to ask any questions below!

Happy broadcasting and happy teaching!

P.S.: By the way, to create a picture for this post I used: 1) Flickr for an image (if you click "Creative Commons Only" under "License", you'll see only photographs you can use without breaking any copyright rules), 2) Canva to put text over the image (it's a free design program that helps to create all sorts of images for social media with the minimum effort).