About TeachVid

TeachVid is a web platform for teachers and learners of languages. It is brought to you by the people who brought you TaskMagic and Textivate.

TeachVid works by focusing on listening micro-skills (decoding, deciphering, parsing etc), dictation (and dictation-like activities), reading, translation (and translation-like activities), and text-reconstruction – simultaneously – whilst helping students to focus on and notice differences and similarities between the structures and vocabulary of their native language and the language that they are in the process of learning.

To find out more about the methodology and pedagogical principles behind TeachVid, check out our methodology page.

TeachVid for teachers

Teachers can create an unlimited number of their own resources for any language based on short YouTube videos, using TeachVid's own resource creation tools on the resources page (on the "My resources" tab).

Resources created by those with a teacher subscription may be saved as:

  • Public and copiable: accessible by anyone via the resource search and copiable by other teachers.
  • Public, not copiable: accessible by anyone via the resource search but not copiable.
  • Unlisted: accessible via a URL but do not show in the resource search.
  • Private: only accessible by the resource owner.

Resources can be based on a video-transcript (with optional translation) and / or on a multiple choice quiz.

Teachers can also access and use any of the growing number of public TeachVid resources available on our platform.

Teachers can create classrooms and invite students. In classrooms teachers can assign activities and assessments for their students to complete. Teachers can invite students to join their class via a simple access code and password. All students need to do is register as a free user, then join the classroom using the codes provided by their teacher.

Assignments can consist of resource previews, practice activities and assessments. A passmark can be set for all assignment activities.

Teachers can opt between several view modes for each activity. View modes determine how students must complete an assignment activity: as a dictation, as a translation, as dictation / translation combined, or as a text reconstruction task with no additional support. Once assignments have been completed, Teachers can view and download data regarding activities completed, scores, time taken, etc.

Teachers can also set up Live Sessions in their private classrooms. These are real-time, time-limited, video-based competitions, where students compete to achieve the highest score on the classroom scoreboard. Points scored per activity are a reflection of students' total accuracy and the difficulty of the activity. You may even set up a Live Session so that students can access each activity once only.

To see what a classroom looks like from a student's point of view, visit this example classroom, with assignments designed to demonstrate how assignment activities can be configured to provide varying levels of support.

Each TeachVid resource also provides access to printable pdf transcripts, translations (where provided) and a variety of worksheets, many of which are based on similar functionality to the interactive activities. A teacher level subscription is required to access pdfs for all resources except for "featured" resources.

TeachVid for students

Premium students on TeachVid can access thousands of video resources in multiple languages, with transcripts and translations provided. Resources help students to notice the differences between language structures and vocabulary, and how concepts are expressed in different languages.

In TeachVid's "Learn Mode" students can view a video as many times as they like, with full control over playback (including the option to change the playback speed on most devices), subtitle language and transcript language. See this blog post on how learn mode engages students with the language content of a video even before they embark on any of the interactive activities.

TeachVid's interactive activities, which are intrinsically linked to video playback, help students to progress from recognition and understanding of spoken language to a focus on producing correct language themselves via a variety of translation-like text-reconstruction tasks.

Premium students can track and monitor their progress with any of the resources available on TeachVid. (Free student subscribers, on the other hand, only have access to "featured resources" + an additional 10 resources per month.)

All registered users can join teachers' classrooms, complete assignment activities etc.

All registered users can create 5 resources of their own via the resources page (on the "My resources" tab). Resources created by free registered users (i.e. those without a teacher subscription) must be saved as either Private or Unlisted resources. Unlisted resources can be shared with others via a URL but do not appear in the public resource search, while Private resources may only be accessed by the resource owner.