Smart (Score 1)

An immeasurably helpful tool that we use at the Army's Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California is a combination of Smart boards and all of our books in PDF/WAV format. The smart boards are projected on using any model projector you want, allowing for cheap or high end purchases, and they basically act as a giant tablet interface hanging on your wall! The students and teachers can draw on the actual screen, interact with whatever you want, etc. Projectors have always been useful in school but its a one-way medium by itself. With these smart boards, you are allowed an entirely different environment than just straight projectors. We absolutely NEEDED high speed internet for use on language sites and native sites in the target language. A good DVD collection in the target language is a must as well. With the projectors, it becomes easy to share a foreign film with an entire class. Our classes were only 10 people each, in 3 classes per team. When we did labs, all 30 of us would gather in labs that had 30 computers with special audio equipment connected to the teachers computer, which the teacher could setup to connect any small groups of students together with the headphones, so they could carry on conversations together without the need to worry about conversations overlapping, or the teacher could take full control over all 30 computers and deliver video control as well, allowing for movies, website demonstrations, etc. If you cant afford the Smart boards, this setup is just as good, however you have to consider the desk space required for all those computers! For home use, we were all issued MP3 cd players, and 8 cds with all the sound files required for the workbooks we had. Originally we used hand held tape recorders for home language practice, and we would bring our activities in for the teacher to grade in the morning. If you want to go more high tech, obviously you could use mini digital voice recorders. I'm sure some of these ideas were mentioned in other posts but I posted all of this to say it actually works at a language school, and its the language school that the military uses to train their linguists.