I’m always on the hunt for new ways to practice listening in my classes. I’m also always on the journey to find better ways to incorporate technology to support language learning.

I wanted to share a tool I ran into via #langchat on Twitter (thanks @SraSpanglish aka Laura Sexton!) and finally got to try out today. It’s called Vibby. It allows students to watch videos and simultaneously annotate what they see happening by adding “highlights”. You can then save & share these highlight videos.

My students are still working on city vocabulary and directions as I have mentioned here and here. We have done a lot of reading activities, but not a ton of listening practice. I am always searching for ways for students to hear people other than me speaking Spanish so they get used to listening to people with different accents. So, I found this video of a girl giving directions around Mexico City and had them do some listening!

I had my Spanish I students annotate in English because I wanted to see what they understood vs just typing words they hear, but you could easily have students write in whatever language you want. I also suggested that they watch the video multiple times to catch more information.

You can also have students watch each others’ highlight reels and comment/upvote on things that other people highlighted. (I haven’t explored that yet, but I’m intrigued! Follow up activity? Discussion? Hmm..).