All of the above are good. Each solves its own problems.
Video lessons. It is very good to watch them, especially at a young age. If you trust the channel, you can turn it on so that the child can watch and go do other things. Passive can easily become active, and that is how it should be. Language comes in through the ears. When there is a lot of language input in the environment, it is great. Video lessons are just language in the environment. Convenient for parents. Convenient for teachers to give homework: “Watch a video.” A very good option. A small note. If it is only watching a video, then this is passive perception. To turn passive into active, I would add some active forms of work: questions or discussions.
A computer application. If the application is competent, then there is both passive and active perception. You can practice a lot of things, do exercises for all types of speech activity. It is important for parents to receive a report (the app should send this) that the child did not just click buttons, but how much time he spent, at what level, how much was correct/incorrect. All of this can be done in the app. A competent app will teach you itself, it will work everything out. And at a personal meeting in class, when everyone has worked through it, you can chat, play in a group, show the child his achievements. For me personally, the value of the app is that the computer app mixes up the tasks. Now it offers you one set of words or pictures, and then it mixes everything up and there will be a different set of words. This is a huge plus compared with the written text from a textbook (or even a video, which is also static). Why is this important? Because children have very good visual memory — when students see the same set of words, they simply remember the set of words visually. That is why we need the pictures to somehow change places or the words to change places. That is why we read the cards in class, and we read the cards so that they can be mixed up all the time, you know, so that if someone did it for me, some machine did it for me, I would only be happy.
Textbooks. The textbook already has all of the exercises thought out; the system is thought out. It is very good if the textbook can “speak.” Because after all, in the 21st century, languages need to be taught with sound, and not explain phonetics on the fingers. If there are many different groups of students, then taking a textbook and following it is great, because less time is spent on preparing for lessons.
A textbook is very good for work, both for individual work and for work in a class with a teacher. A class is a group. The child sees that he is not alone (“suffering”) — in a group it is easy to create a language environment. For kids, a teacher is an extension of their mother. They begin to love the language because of the person who teaches this language (and because of their mother, too).
I have a video about how to choose a textbook of Russian as a foreign language for children, and about how you can teach without a textbook at all.
What do I advise? Use everything at once, simultaneously: the textbook, video materials, and applications.
