User: skovtop.net

Tools I have used

On: Setting up a High-Tech Language School?

I have been to the Defence Language Institute, where I was taking classes in Arabic. We had MP3 players issued to us, with listening drills, vocab pronunciation, and a little real world material (radio ads, etc from target language countries). We only did 1 hour a day in the old style labs (tapes and headphones), and 1 hour a week in the computer labs. The computers had custom software that allowed us to play memory or hangman like games in the target language, or surf to arabic websites. The last piece of tech that we used was the SmartBoard system. This was nice because you could easily capture and print notes, make little learning games by dragging words around as objects to form phrases, and it did not leave dry erase ink on your hands if you touched the board. Some classes in other languages got laptops issued. That might be a little spendy, but you could offer online tutoring, set the DVD drives to region 2 and have a video library for them to check out from, even have an ftp site where they could upload assignments, if you like the idea of a paperless school.

I know some people here know more about this topic than myself, but I can say that there is a high success rate at this school, and they teach about as fast as possible (Arabic fluency is achieved in 63 weeks of class). But I feel that too much tech will drown the basics out.

And I agree with the poster that said class size is important. 1:12 ratio is a good goal imo. Not too many to have people left out, but big enough to have variety is speaking partners for the students.