Make a list of tools which help you to improve your listening skills in your daily life

MAKE A LIST OF TOOLS WHICH HELP YOU TO IMPROVE YOUR LISTENING SKILLS IN YOUR DAILY LIFE
For me improving my listening skills is the hardest of the four skills to master. Unlike reading, listening happens in real time and it can be hard to control the speed of the information coming at me. I also have to deal with a range of unfamiliar accents, noise interference from background environment and the pressure to respond to the person I am listening to.
In this writing I’d like to share a cross section of what’s freely available for me.
LYRICS TRAINING.
This app has long been a favourite of mine as it combines listening to songs with learning a language. I can choose songs in a variety of languages then watch the video of the song and try to reconstruct the lyrics. I can choose the level of difficulty by selecting either to reconstruct the whole of the lyrics or to just have a few of the words taken out.
This is a great app to get listening intensively, but remember I can successfully recreate the lyrics of the song without necessarily understanding me so it’s good for me
LISTEN NOTES.
This is a podcast search engine with a huge collection of podcasts on a wide range of topics. Podcasts are a great source of listening materials for me and can easily be downloaded onto mobile devices for replay at any convenient moment. Listen Notes can help me to find listening materials that fit my interests. If you log in, you can start to ‘curate’ collections of different podcast episodes that they like and keep working on my listening skills while listening to them whenever is convenient.
TEACHVID.
This is another app that combines listening with watching videos. TeachVid uses video from YouTube and builds a range of different activities around them, varying from text reconstruction, translation, multiple choice, jumbled sentences and many more. One of the nice things about TeachVid is that I can choose the types of exercise I want to do for improving specific listening skills.
I hope this writing gives students some idea of the range and variety of resources that are now available for helping them develop their listening skills.