Tech Blog - English Central

I am not much of a technology user in my classroom.
I am very old school: teacher, students, desks, writing materials, textbooks, handouts and whiteboard.

However, at my current workplace, Jeollanamdo Education and Training Institute (JETI), we used English Central for a few years.

http://www.englishcentral.com

It is a website for speaking and listening.
Students watch videos (listening), and then will repeat sentences from each video in their own voice.
The program can measure intonation and pitch and give the student a rating based on how well they pronounced the words or sentences. The one problem though is that the website is based on a standard American accent. I have known many Koreans who studied English in other countries such as Australia, Ireland, South Africa or the United Kingdom. In addition, many Koreans do not speak with a particular accent. 
Nonetheless, I feel that the website over the two years that my workplace used it was useful. Some students went beyond their assigned targets of videos listened to and words/sentences spoken. A few even kept studying after the six month training program.
As an instructor I had to monitor my homeroom class and make sure everyone meet the weekly homework targets. In addition, I had to check their progress in speaking (pronunciation). I could see who was weak and needed improvement. The program could also identify what letters, or words caused difficulty for someone. At this point I could counsel the student that they needed to work on this or that area in their pronunciation. Also, I could see who was putting an effort into trying to improve by redoing their pronunciation of sentences from one video. We encouraged students to pronounce the sentences from a video again and improve their grade. At the end of each session I had to give a grade for each student based on how much effort they put into their listening and speaking with English Central, and how much they improved over the months.
Last fall my workplace (executive decision) stopped using English Central. We were never told why it was ended.

Currently, another program called ESPT, from Korea, is being used primarily for listening at my workplace. It is not set up for speaking and pronunciation. While English Central was not perfect I feel that it has potential. I wish there was a way for it to measure correct pronunciation not just based on an American accent.