Duolingo comes up trumps

Duolingo is an online language learning site which has been very popular globally because it runs across all devices , is easily accessible, is free, is constructed intelligently and has a very positive attitude to promoting languages acquisition skills. It is not perfect but students are successful very quickly on it and so they are motivated to improve and do well. We run a paid language learning site at school to support and supplement our learning and it really is comprehensive. Duolingo , though , was something which made my year 9s very enthusiastic this morning. I got them to try Cram, LingoDingo, Duolingo and Babbel and then write a short review on EdMettle. One of the best ways to get new millennium students to learn is to get them to review things or something based on some solid knowledge they have. They use the paid site Education Perfect all the time and love it because it is thorough, customisable, offers local and global competitions and runs across all devices. Not everyone can have a paid app. Even if you love an app, it is good to have alternatives. There were periods of silence, periods of consultation and collaboration with each other or me, periods of silence and intense concentration, laughter and then we broke into a big discussion of the relative merits of different social media platforms. These students love to have access to online learning, videos and then a reliable and trustworthy guide through it all. They like adults to be their sounding board and validators. They were steering towards Duolingo so we talked about why they liked it. One reason was it ran easily on their iPads. They liked winning awards. They liked a site where they could go back and pick up where they left off. They also thought the idea of being able to get accreditation through Duolingo testing was a good idea for global acknowledgement of language learning. Duolingo now has some big , important support like Harvard and LinkedIn and the site runs in so many different languages. We can increasingly share and collaborate globally because we are improving linguistic competence in our students and ourselves.