Last Updated on 2020-08-25Back to school season brings back all the feelings for students: excitement, nervousness, and the chance to get back into a familiar routine after summer break. Wait, don’t teachers experience this too? Indeed we do! It’s not just teachers and students, though: parents, school officials and many others are greatly affected by[…]
Last Updated on 2021-01-15As 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[…]
Last Updated on 2021-01-15Guest 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[…]
Last Updated on 2020-04-15 The Overnight Transition to Remote Instruction The sudden switch to online teaching has dumbfounded many. There is a fact we must acknowledge, designing online courses takes a substantial amount of thought and effort to get it ready. Even the most experienced ones of us—freaked out and wondered how we were going[…]
Last Updated on 2020-06-26If you would like your students to practice the format of the AP World Language and Culture Exam now instead of waiting until May, Extempore can help. This guide shows how to create Extempore assignments that replicate the same time constraints and environment that your students will have during the test, when[…]
Last Updated on 2020-04-09 Language Acquisition is something that is studied worldwide and languages themselves are something that many people wish they could acquire in the blink of an eye. But we all know that without taking a class, the pathway to language learning is not always what we make it out to be. Below[…]
Last Updated on 2020-03-13But we can still make progress towards our goals. We are seeing more and more schools across the US and the rest of the world enact temporary closures in an attempt to control the spread of the COVID-19 disease. Closures are often accompanied by promises that teaching will continue to be done[…]
Last Updated on 2020-04-10 No one can deny that technology plays an important part in our teaching practices these days. The new generation of students, the so-called “digital natives”, usually welcome state-of-the-art lessons that integrate technology with great enthusiasm, as it is a great motivation booster. Yet, when we come to think about what makes[…]
If your students were dropped into the target language environment by themselves right at this second, what could they do? Could they survive with more than just primitive hand signals? “Freewrite” and “freetalk” assignments give you those answers. These tasks allow students to show what they can do in the target language with no (okay,[...]
Posted on 2021-01-04 by Grant Castner
So simple yet often overlooked, reading out loud (‘oral reading’ in academic parlance) carries countless benefits for learners of second languages.
Posted on 2020-12-14 by Grant Castner
Part I – Overview Extempore, The Speaking Practice App, that’s us. On Extempore, flexible features can help you craft immaculate assessments and extra speaking opportunities for your students. It’s also a solution for a plethora of needs in the language class, including real-world tasks, simple end of class exit tickets, as well as graded summative[...]
Posted on 2020-12-04 by Grant Castner
