If you read our blog, you’ve probably noticed that we talk a lot here about using Extempore for regular speaking practice at home as a way to reinforce skills learned in the classroom, to build fluency, and to develop confidence. Although those are undeniable benefits of our app, students and teachers can also use Extempore[…]
We live in a mobile world. We take our devices everywhere we go and do countless daily tasks on them. And increasingly, mobile technology is becoming part of daily life in education as well. So, why, when it comes to language learning, are so many of our lessons still so “non-mobile”? The language lab, in particular, despite[…]
If there’s anything that teachers and students can agree on, it’s that summer vacation is…what’s the word? Amazing? Phenomenal? Ecstatic? But, as we all know, there’s a price to pay. Our language students–at any level–get more than a little rusty. Those preterit and imperfect endings get mixed up, commands get forgotten altogether. All those skills that we[…]
The Extempore App: Using mobile technologies to obtain and assess spontaneous speech.
We’ve all heard the cliché: a picture is worth a thousand words. But with Extempore, the expression might actually have some literal truth to it! That’s because our app allows teachers and students to use images to kickstart a discussion in the target language. Obviously, an audio prompt from a teacher most closely mimics a real-life conversation,[…]
For all of you Spanish and Portuguese teachers out there, we wanted to let you know that we’ll be presenting Extempore at the upcoming 98th Annual AATSP (American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese) Conference in Miami, Florida (July 8 – 11, 2016). Two of Extempore’s founders, Susana Pérez Castillejo, Ph.D. and Chantal Thornberry,[…]
On June 29th, Extempore’s founders were interviewed by educational celebrity Paulino Brener for his Educators Performers Creators Show (EPCSHOW). The interview was broadcasted live through Google Hangouts and Facebook. During the show, Extempore’s cofounders Susana Perez and Carlos Seoane demoed the Extempore platform and answered questions from the host and the audience. As part of the[…]
As we do every year, we use the summer break to push updates to the platform. Some of these updates are major new features; but many others are small tweaks, performance and usability improvements that are reported to us during the year. That being said, we’re excited to announce the first one of the summer![...]
Posted on 2020-06-26 by Thomas Murr
Guest Post by Susana Perez-Castillejo, PhD, Assistant Professor of Spanish, University of St. Thomas. Beyond the Zoom breakout rooms for speaking activities and shared Google docs for collaborative writing practice, there are other tools we can leverage to make our synchronous class meetings a bit more interactive. These are ideas I have been learning these past few[...]
Posted on 2020-04-16 by Thomas Murr
Nowadays technological developments have affected our lives, how we communicate, how we learn and, of course, our way of teaching. Indeed, it is almost impossible to find a language class that does not use some technological support. Computer assisted language learning has changed the practice of teaching (Chapelle & Voss, 2016). Technology in Language[...]
Posted on 2020-02-10 by Thomas Murr
