When I am learning a language, I find that one of the most useful things to do is to listen to something at the same time as I read it. In other words, I have both a transcript of the text and an audio recording of it. This helps me with my reading, my listening and my pronunciation. In the past, I have used this technique to learn both Spanish and French, and now I am using it to learn Polish.
I recently came across a superb website that provides just this facility. VoiceTube (www.voicetube.com) offers videos in English, together with clear and accurate subtitles. The subtitles are highlighted, too – so, as you listen to the audio, the corresponding part of the text is indicated on the screen. I find this very helpful.
There is a huge range of content, all organised by genre, and each video is displayed on the left with the corresponding subtitles on the right for easy reading. The subtitles are clickable: you can click on a word, and a definition of it will appear on the screen. Along with the definition, an audio file is also provided which allows you to hear that word in isolation. It’s great to be able to listen to the words pronounced both separately and also as part of connected speech.
The site also offers some excellent additional features, though not all of these are free, including one which I find particularly useful.
Note-taking
For me, the standout feature of this website is the note-taking facility. Students can listen to a video, pause it at a certain point and then open up a note-taking window and add notes. This makes the process of watching a video much more interactive, and it avoids the problem of the students just watching passively.
When the students add their notes, those notes themselves also become clickable. This means that if the students then click on one of their notes, the corresponding part of the video will play. This is a really useful feature and one that can be used in some very creative ways.
One way of using this clickable notes feature, is to get the students to play the video and, at key points, to pause the video and write questions in note form related to it. This forces them to think about the content of the video and create questions that are answered by it. When they click on one of the questions they have written, the part of the video that answers that question will play. I haven’t done this with my students yet, but I did run some tests with a group of teachers and it worked really well.
The note-taking feature can be used in many more ways. Instead of simply adding notes about the content, the students could write down the key vocabulary related to the video. This way, when they revise their notes, they can click on a word, and the corresponding part of the video will play, enabling them to hear that word being used in context.
The clickable notes feature would be ideal for a flipped classroom context. In the flipped classroom, the students do the lower-order thinking at home and prepare for activities in class that will involve higher-order thinking skills. Using VoiceTube, the students can watch a video at home, take notes on it and then use these notes in the classroom in a related activity.
For example, the students might get into small groups in class, share their notes within the group and use them as the basis for making a summary about the contents of a video or for answering questions that the teacher has provided. I like the idea of connecting what the students do at home with what they do in the class.
One idea that I have been working on a lot recently is to get the students to focus on what is not in the video. This entails getting them to watch a video and then think of questions that the video doesn’t answer. In this way, I am trying to get the students to think outside the box and go beyond the content of the video.
VoiceTube is free, and you don’t even need to sign up to use the basic features. However, if you want to make use of the note-taking facility and the word definitions, you do need to sign up.
To make things easy, I have created a help video that will get you up and running in no time, and you can watch this at https://youtu.be/4KbkhVCBv5U.
Russell Stannard is the founder of www.teachertrainingvideos.com, which won a British Council ELTons award for technology. He is a freelance teacher and writer and also a NILE Associate Trainer.
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