This tool can create and add beautiful videos with photos, text and music for presentational or other communicative activities. The user can begin with a template and ready made images or start from scratch with their own images.
This easy-to-read introduction to SAMR (standing for "Substitution," "Augmentation," "Modification" and "Redefinition"), a model for helping integrate "technology tools into foreign-language classrooms," is blogged by a Chinese content and technology specialist who, I trust, has a lot of experience of incorporating media into Chinese learning activities. Besides clearly explaining how the SAMR model works for a L2 class via really useful tech tools such as Google Docs and Flipgrid, this blog also reveals a fact that our students "are not all 'digital natives,'" and encourages us, 21st-century educators, to "meet our students halfway to use tech for learning." I found the first two SAMR stages, namely, "Substitution" and "Augmentation," are very helpful for evaluating the interpretive mode implemented with appropriate media.
In a fast changing world impacted by technological advances, language usage becomes "one of the factors being altered most drastically." And as language teachers, most of us feel language teaching has become inevitably bound to technology more and quickly. All this is talked about in "The Edtech Podcast" posted here. Listening through the lengthy audio discussion on how language learning is or can or should be equipped with technology one way or another, one can be happier to see "both sides of change: how we must adjust and what we can take advantage of."