ANVILL for Android

11 things about ANVILL

1. ANVILL foregrounds key elements of modern language lesson planning and task design: input and output tasks are connected; multimedia elements are easily added, edited, and reused; learner output can be shared or private; and learner outcomes are presented in easily understood reports.

2. ANVILL is a web-based toolbox for language teachers that makes it easy to create, assign, and assess spoken language tasks.

3. Whether that’s one activity, like a voiceboard where learners respond to a spoken prompt, or a set of carefully sequenced activities (e.g. cloze exercises, readings, and interactive video comprehension quizzes), the contents can be ordered and recombined in interesting ways.

4. Now instructors can create ANVILL “assignments” where speech and video (and right-to-left and CJK writing systems) can just as easily be the response type as plain text currently is.

5. Unlike other web-based authoring systems, ANVILL is quite flexible in how the building blocks of a media-based lesson can be assembled.

6. Digital textbooks are great (see Faber, 2019 for what’s possible in customized coursebook creation), but for many of us the institution’s local Learning Management System (LMS) is our primary authoring environment.

7. In recent years the H5P application has become quite popular with language teachers (see Spasova, 2017 for a good introduction to authoring with H5P).

8. If you want your multiple-choice quiz to include spoken prompts, ANVILL permits it.

9. ANVILL is “LTI-compatible”, which means that lessons can be created right inside in Canvas, Moodle or other similar systems.

10. The ANVILL platform is optimized for high quality speech and video.

11. It is particularly useful for teachers looking to provide students with language practice outside of class, or in a lab setting.