Cheryl Johnson, OFLA Parliamentarian and Bylaws
Retired Instructional Technologist for the Department of Modern Languages, Denison University

What is ANVILL?
ANVILL is an Open Educational Resource full of tools for building rich interactive lessons and activities in which you can incorporate authentic materials. These tools are extremely useful for providing students with practice outside of the classroom and were designed and developed specifically for language educators by the Yamada Language Center and CASLS at the University of Oregon. In fact ANVILL stands for A National Virtual Language Lab.

How much does it cost?
ANVILL is free for language educators who work at not-for-profit public and private educational institutions anywhere in the world. 

Which languages does it support?
It supports Romance and Germanic languages as well as right-to-left and CJK writing systems.

How safe is it?
ANVILL is private, secure and ad-free — they do not use or sell student data, and they have enterprise-level security in place.

Which devices work best ?
This toolkit works on any device. You can access the toolkit through a web browser (preferably Chrome) on a computer and there are apps for both Android and iOS. In addition, ANVILL is LTI-compatible (the acronym stands for “Learning Tools Interoperability”), which means that activities and lesson units can be created right inside learning management systems like D2L, Blackboard, Canvas, and Moodle. 

What kinds of activities can I create with ANVILL?
You can create, assign, and assess spoken language tasks or written tasks as well as  provide students with reading or listening comprehension activities. There are 36 different tools that allow you to easily make interactive and gamified tasks including  memory games, flashcards, sequencing activities, drag and drop activities, voiceboards, and blogs. See the screenshot below to get a sense of the variety of activities.

Where can I learn more about this toolkit?
You can read more about the toolkit here: https://fltmag.com/anvill/

If you have more time on your hands, you can get a more in depth look at the toolkit by viewing the hour-long webinar “ANVILL 3.0: A New Set of Tools for Building Rich Interactive Lessons in Language Teaching” on YouTube. 

How do I get started?
Go to https://anvill.uoregon.edu/register to sign up for a free account.