Teaching Languages Made Easy with iSpring Suite

Today we are glad to share another client’s success story. It was sent to us by Qinghua Chen, an English teacher from China who just discovered how iSpring Suite can facilitate both in-class and online learning for his students. Happy reading!

My name is Qinghua Chen. I teach English at Beijing 21^st Century High school in China. Recently, when I was searching solutions on putting contents on my moodle site, Damienglish.com, I came across a post in teacher’s forum, strongly recommending iSpring products. I visited the website of iSpring, downloaded a trial version of the product, and I can’t tell how excited I was when using the product for the first time. I just felt all my previous troubles and embarrasement I had with PPTs were in the past, with the installation of this amazing product on my computer.

Have you ever experienced a situation when you have prepared carefully edited PPTs with rocking videos and audios, and when you get to presenting, you are embarrassed, struggling from folders and urls to make your videos play? The audience is becoming impatient and starts to think that you haven’t prepared well. Have you also experienced that even with your great presenting skills, your audience becomes bored of static PPT slides with nothing but words and figures?

As a teacher who uses PPTs and does presentations every day, those things troubled me most in the past, until I found the ultimate solution, the powerful iSpring Suite!

Let me tell you here about two great benefits I got from iSpring Suite.

In the past, while editing my PPTs to prepare for a class, I needed to present with audio and video listening exercises to facilitate my class with listening comprehension capability, since I am a language teacher. But there are several matters I need to pay great attention to:

1) The url of the video/audio

Since I need to control the playing, I have to use VBA, like in the picture, which is very confusing for non-technicians like me and many other teachers who focus mostly on their teaching rather than programming.

When this is done, I need to copy all the PPTs and related files to a USB dirve.

But before I start the class, I need to get in the classroom five minutes earlier and re-edit the urls to match the properties in the classroom computer, which is again very confusing. And when the versions of PowerPoint don’t match on two machines, other unknown errors may appear.

As a language teacher, I sometimes need to do this ten times during a single listening section to make each of my listening tracks work on every slide, which is painstaking.

But now, with the publishing facilities of iSpring Suite, presenting in a class has for the first time become so easy!

You know what I do now? I insert the videos, audios, pictures and animations in the PPT and then I publish the presentation with iSpring Suite. Then – magically – a single SWF Flash file is created with all the content of my class inside! I only need this file to teach the class, and all the preview troubles are solved. All the videos and audios play perfectly!

My students enjoy this function even more than I do, becuase now I can simply distribute the Flash file and they can review their classes with all the exercises at home with just a single click. They can also view the notes and answer.

There are several more benefts I would like to mention:

2) With iSpring Suite, the created Flash files are very easy to be optimized according to my own preferences. If I would like to have a higher quality of the video in my presentation, it can all be tweaked. This actually helped me a lot. Now I can choose the quality myself depending on what I need that video for.

3) I have a moodle website at school to help my students learn online, and with iSpring I definitely made my moodle site more meaningful, thanks to the great interactive courses iSpring Suite helped me to create and publish. And what’s better – iSpring’s courses are SCORM compatible. Take a look at my site:

With iSpring, my site has become more powerful, and my students really enjoy this type of learning and reviewing material. Plus, it’s more eco-friendly.

4) The elegant quiz maker helped me to test students in a much more effective way. I used to grade hundreds of papers every week and spend serveral more hours to do the statistics and write the review. But now, with the quiz maker in iSpring Suite, writing and giving exams is not longer a burdern for me. Students seem to enjoy these interactive quizzes much more than normal paper-based tests. Look at one of the listening comprehension quizzes I created for my students – a typical spot dictation test. The result will be shown to students, paper will be graded and grades will be tracked automatically. This is nothing but amazing!

There are more features in iSpring Suite that I am not familiar with, and it will take me some time to go through the knowledge base on the iSpring website to learn them. Anyway I am convinced that iSpring Suite is exactly the product I wanted to facilitate my teaching as a Language teacher in China and I really appreciate the creativity and devotions of the iSpring company to have brought teachers powerful products to make our education more successful.

Qinghua Chen

Beijing