Vialogue for World Language Teaching?

As I enter into the 8th week of my ILT master’s program, I want to take a moment and reflect on an earlier assignment from my Social Media and Digital cultures class where I was challenged to try a new social media site/app. In the list of suggested sites was Vialogue.

As a world language teacher, I am always looking for new resources to improve students listening comprehension. So when I learned that Vialogue (Video + Dialogue ) is an online video site with a group discussion feature, I felt there could be a lot of potential that I could use it for in my class. So I went with it.

Here are some of my thoughts about Vialogue after using it with two students last week.

Likes: 1. Sign-up is easy. The processing time of uploading a video is considered relatively faster, compared with uploading speed on Youtube.It took me about 4 minutes to upload a video which is sized 700 MB on Vialogue.

2.Vialogue allows one to create group discussion by stamping the video with text questions.

3. It also provides multiple-choice-question feature located underneath the video and it is able to provide a poll resulting from the multiple-choice questions.

4.Also, it can be set up as a private discussion if you want your video to be viewed only by the people you chose to share it with. This feature is quite useful for a school teacher as parents are usually concerned for the privacy of their children.

Dislikes: 1.Vialogue has lots of potentials. It would be nice to be able to see and post comments to Vialogue while the Vialogue is in full-screen mode. I often like to view videos in full screen. When doing so, seeing comments becomes a tedious process.

2.Also when I check responses to my poll/question via the gear icon on the Vialogue's play page, it only tell me the percentage of each choice but did not reveal who or when the choice was made. Hopefully, it will be improved soon.

3. There's no way to edit videos or jump to the section of a long video to focus on what I really want students to view. Usually, I will have students to watch only part of the video then answer the question. Uploading a whole video not only takes extra time but also encumbers students less focused video segments.

4. There is no a rewind 10/20 seconds button. It would be very helpful for students who are practicing listening practice if they can rewind the video automatically.

From my point of view, Dialogues has lots of potentials and is a great concept; however, it is not perfect for one-on-one student listening training. I will keep looking for another app/site to better fit my needs in terms of world language teaching.