Duolingo is a language-learning
platform that I believe would be extremely successful in the classroom.
Duolingo is accessible to everyone. It is completely free of cost and includes
a language-learning website, app, crowd sourced text translation, and a
language proficiency assessment center. The app is available on iOS, Android, and
Windows 8 and 10. The website and app together offer over 50 different language
courses across 23 languages and additional courses are currently in
development.
During account set up, the user is
asked to set goals and expectations including how much time they hope to
practice a day. The time they put in
each day is tracked and recorded, giving you daily reminders of how far along
you are, what topics you have covered, and how much more progress you need to
reach your designated goal. Duolingo understands the importance of continually
refreshing each skill that you learn and keeps a strength bar that
reminds you of which skill has not been reviewed recently and reminds you to
refresh it before having to learn it all over again. Duolingo has also
partnered with LinkedIn so users can post their fluency with a certain language
directly to their LinkedIn profile.
In January 2015, Duolingo released Duolingo for Schools.
This technology provides teachers with a centralized dashboard that can display
their students’ progress and track how many assignments each student has
completed on time, submitted late, or missed. The dashboard allows teachers to
understand each individual student’s stengths and weaknesses at each skill
they cover and helps them optimize their language-teaching methods. It also
allows students to follow friends and classmates and see the progress of those
around them in order to stay motivated through a healthy competition.
Duolingo offers various learning
tools that will properly cater to each student’s preferred learning style. They
have activities that incorporate listening, reading, and speaking skills. Using
the microphone Duolingo will ask the students to speak specific words and
phrases and will only allow them to move on to the next phrase when the student
pronounces everything correctly. Duolingo also has activities that ask the
student to listen and translate. Duolingo allows the students to immerse
themselves in the language and practice their skills by reading and translating
real articles from the internet. They categorize the articles by progress,
category, and difficulty and also give the option for users to upload their own
articles. Duolingo gives students multiple faucets to learn in creative ways
and lays out a structure for teachers to help keep students engaged and
improving.
A pitfall for teachers is that it
is extremely structured and does not leave much room for flexibility. Once you
sign up, it keeps you active by diminishing strength bars and sending daily reminders
to practice. Duolingo also does not allow teachers to jump ahead to different
skills. You can only open a new skill when you have completed the one before it.
In 2013, Apple honored Duolingo as
the iPhone App of the Year, which was the first time this recognition was
awarded to an educational application. Duolingo also won Best Education Startup
at the 2014 Crunchies, which is an industry award given out by several technology
blogs to the Silicon Valley companies and venture capitalists they cover.
