Possible Online Apps for the German-language Classroom

I'm taking a summer course on technology in Education through the University of Minnesota's CARLA Lab. I'm really enjoying the experience and learning some great new tools for my classroom. Part of my assignment this week has been to look at online presentation tools.

I'm going to use this blog as a scrapbook of the ones that I liked--or I had used already. At the end of the week, I need to do projects using two of the apps.

Here we go.

• VoiceThread is the app that I have used the most this week. It's a definite one that I will use this year. It sets up a video and lets the instructor comment upon important elements or draw diagrams Madden-style to illustrate key content. Later, I will post the project I completed with VoiceThread.
• Vocaroo is a great way to record sound and share it easily. It's so simple to use: you record a response and share the link. No uploading or downloading. Love this! I see many oral quizzes in my students' futures.
• Flipgrid was one app that I figured out pretty easily. Respondents can easily post video responses to a given question. I'm not sure that I'll be able to use it, because my students don't have broad access to webcams. I think it will be easier to get microphones for all of my students than to get webcams. Still, this is a very easy-to-use app. In an iPad classroom, this would really work.
• Screenr is an app that I have used in the past. It's an easy way to make a screencast and convert it into uploadable video to YouTube. This is an effort I made to do a flipped lesson for my German class in 2013.

• Blipfoto is an app that lets you share pictures among a community. This would be an interesting way to demonstrate language learning. I also found it unwieldy with sharing--I want students to be able to link their work to a central web site, using an embed code. This was my first pic.
• I first heard about Padlet from a fellow English teacher who recommended it as an online word wall. This would have some definite applications in the foreign-language classroom.

That's my review of online apps for the foreign-language classroom. I'm looking forward to trying this out. I'll keep you posted.