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New AAPPL Style Listening Task!

Published by SraSpanglish on

I feel pretty good about my DIY AAPPL tasks for reading! It’s not too hard to get text to do what you want on Google Slides, so making tasks that look like the real thing is totally doable! HOWEVER, the listening can be a whole other ball of wax, because as far as I know, you can’t insert audio in Google Slides.

Video has been working fine for my purposes, but it doesn’t really work like the little moveable audio clips–or even the static ones–that you have to match to pictures or descriptions. What’s more is it makes it kind of hard to break the listening up into digestible chunks, especially for novices–ESPECIALLY if you don’t want to spend all day downloading and uploading and editing and downloading again.

I think I’ve figured out a pretty handy video solution, though, that allows me to break up the videos without going gray in the process. For this process, I need three online tools:

  1. OnlineVideoConverter
  2. Nimbus Screenshot Chrome Extension
  3. Adobe Spark Video

And then what I end up with looks something like this:

On the right, you can see the video I created in Spark using the audio I stripped using the video converter. I also took screenshots of various phases of the original video so that they can be matched up with the numbers I have used to split the video into one big series of pseudo-clips. So the process looks like this:

Collect audio

  1. Find a video on YouTube (or upload one!) that is appropriate for novice comprehension levels (thought it could be used with intermediate–it’s just that these drag-and-drop type questions are usually novice on the real thing).
  2. Convert the video to MP3 by copying its URL to the converter page.

Create video

  1. Create a new video in Spark and add 5 slides with one number on each (plus a citation of the video of course, on the final slide).
  2. Upload the MP3 of the video and click on the time in the lower right corner of the slide to adjust the length of the slide to fit the length of the clip you want (I measure this by listening to the video on YouTube and noting the timestamp where I want to stop for each there.)
  3. Download the video and upload to Drive for easy embedding.

Collect images

  1. Screenshot a section of the video that corresponds with each of the segments you designated with the numbered slides as well as some after the end of the pseudo clips (the AAPPL usually has extra distractors I find).
  2. Insert and scramble the screenshots on the slide, making sure that you have selected images that clearly fit or do not fit with the selected “clips.”

If you wanted to get REALLY fancy (read: tricky), you COULD make a video with more than 5 “clips” so that you could download your clip video, RE-upload it into multiple separate slides with different segments of your FIRST clip video. This is pretty much the only way that I can think of that you could scramble the order of the audio or otherwise skip around the MP3 sample and omit segments without having to turn to a more complex editing program than Spark.

But there you have it: a way to create multiple “clips” without endlessly uploading and downloading separate videos!


SraSpanglish

Laura Sexton is a passion-driven, project-based language educator in Gastonia, North Carolina. She loves sharing Ideas for integrating Project-Based Learning in the world language classroom, including example projects, lessons, assessment tips, driving questions, and reflection.