We’re teaching in a digital world. Most students actually turn to websites to help them learn Spanish—and they can be an invaluable resource for teachers. They offer a variety of features (such as multimedia activities) and formats (such as “cloze” questions and open-ended questions) for different learning styles.
Here are 13 resourceful websites for learning Spanish that you’ll want to incorporate into your Spanish classroom.
This website allows students to access brief explanations of grammatical points and practice with verb drills and pronunciation. It also offers custom flashcards (cool!), an idiom generator and a bilingual cultural section where students can read and listen about different aspects of Hispanic American and Spanish culture.
On top of more traditional grammar and vocabulary practice methods, your students can actually learn Spanish by watching clips that native speakers actually consume.
FluentU takes authentic videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons.
You can try FluentU for free for 2 weeks. Check out the website or download the iOS app or Android app.
Since it has flashcards and post-video quizzes too, it’s great for in-class activities, computer lab class days, long-term group projects and individual homework assignments.
With more than six million active users every month, Duolingo is the most popular language-learning platform around! Although it’s best known for its mobile app, Duolingo is also available for free on the web.
Duolingo’s Spanish course is very well-developed with plenty of support for teachers, and students can get through a lesson in as fast as 5 minutes. Each lesson consists of games like matching pairs and mock conversations for teaching vocabulary and grammar. There are also Spanish podcasts, stories and audio lessons that you can use as listening practice for students.
No Spanish class website would be complete without a link to an English-Spanish dictionary. Spanish Dict is the most popular online resource available, with more than a million words available for translation.
Aside from being a dictionary, it even has Spanish courses, vocabulary lists and full grammar lessons from beginner to advanced. Students can also use it as a conjugator–it can identify the tense of a Spanish verb and even show the full conjugation chart.
You can learn more with this full review of SpanishDict.
Memrise is a user-generated learning platform that specializes in language learning and uses flashcards as memory aids. Its focus is on conversational Spanish, and you can choose the specific Spanish dialect and accent that you want to teach.
One particular strength of Memrise is that it includes a lot of video clips of actual native speakers for students learning new Spanish vocabulary. It also keeps track of which words need to be reviewed for the day using spaced repetition.
One of the best and my personal favorite is Colby College’s website. There’s stuff here for absolute beginners to the most advanced students, ranging from verb conjugation practice to more open-ended exercises and even fun multimedia activities with music.
This is a site you’ll definitely want to recommend for your Spanish language courses and encourage your students to work with often.
A cool site that does just what you think it does: It conjugates verbs. In all tenses, moods, shapes and sizes.
Students just click here and enter a verb they wish to conjugate, choose the subject pronoun they want and…¡ahí está! (there it is!) The site even offers the -se conjugations of the imperfect subjunctive! Fancy!
A neat-o website from the University of Texas at Austin. The website features a series of video-recorded interviews with native speakers that gradually increase in complexity, so there’s something for every skill level—from beginning to superior. Students can click around here to test themselves or build their listening comprehension skills.
This is another neat site similar to Conjugation.org, but it has a greater number of topics that students can choose from.
In addition to verbs, students can click on self-correcting tutorials involving nouns and articles, adjectives, pronouns, adverbs, prepositions, vocabulary, spelling and pronunciation. Some of the links take you to “off-site” websites like StudySpanish.com.
The breadth and variety of tutorials will appeal to students looking for more comprehensive online resources.
A cool Spanish language practice website that offers drills on Spanish grammar. For each grammar topic, there are ten sentences where you have to fill in the blanks using dropdowns. The format is interesting because one sentence can have several possible correct answers.
Although fewer grammatical points are offered for practice, a neat feature of this site is that students get extensive feedback about why a particular answer was right or wrong.
Okay, so this website isn’t exactly for practicing conjugating irregular verbs or mastering the differences between ser and estar. Still, the grammar glossary is extremely useful for students who are still struggling to understand how a noun differs from a pronoun and what on earth “subject-verb agreement” means.
It’s a “must-have” for beginning and intermediate Spanish students, as well as for advanced students who need a refresher!
Quizlet might seem at first glance as though it would be too general for a list like this. However, the website offers the awesome capability to not only make your own study cards, but also to quickly look up and use flashcards that other students designed for their classes.
This means that there are entire sets of flashcards already available for categories like “reflexive verbs,” “body parts,” “animals,” “adjectives” and so much more. Students can even find flashcard sets based on a particular book chapter or teacher/professor.
This user-friendly website allows you to create your own educational games, quizzes, surveys and more, as well as explore more than ten thousand Spanish activities and quizzes created by other educators.
Students can also easily take your quizzes on the platform, and Quia automatically scores them and compiles their grades for you. Why not take advantage of all those resources in one convenient location?
5 Tips for Using Websites in Your Spanish Classes
Make sure students don’t see the use of the websites simply as “busy work.” Let them know why you’re assigning the websites (practice for an exam, for example).
Since everyone learns differently, give your students a choice as to which websites they’ll work with.
Consider assigning some websites for credit and others as optional (but highly recommended!). You can even use some of the exercises in class as input material or a quick warm-up.
To make the websites easy to find, post an organized list of favorites online and direct students there.
Finally, encourage students to recommend additional nifty websites they might come across.
And there you have it—a starter guide for making a Spanish class website, with 13 amazing sites that you can share with your students right away.
If you've made it this far that means you probably enjoy learning Spanish with engaging material and will then love FluentU.
Other sites use scripted content. FluentU uses a natural approach that helps you ease into the Spanish language and culture over time. You’ll learn Spanish as it’s actually spoken by real people.
FluentU has a wide variety of videos, as you can see here:
FluentU brings native videos within reach with interactive transcripts. You can tap on any word to look it up instantly. Every definition has examples that have been written to help you understand how the word is used. If you see an interesting word you don’t know, you can add it to a vocab list.
Review a complete interactive transcript under the Dialogue tab, and find words and phrases listed under Vocab.
Learn all the vocabulary in any video with FluentU’s robust learning engine. Swipe left or right to see more examples of the word you’re on.
The best part is that FluentU keeps track of the vocabulary that you’re learning, and gives you extra practice with difficult words. It'll even remind you when it’s time to review what you’ve learned. Every learner has a truly personalized experience, even if they’re learning with the same video.
