As I posted earlier this week (see Duolingo Takes Next Step To Conquer Language Learning World & Lets Teachers Create Virtual Classrooms), the super-popular Duolingo language-learning app unveiled its free Duolingo For Schools feature today.
It looks impressive. It’s very easy to register as a teacher and create a class — in fact, it just took a few seconds. The only minor annoyance is that it appears you have to create a new username as a teacher — in other words, if you presently are registered on Duolingo, they won’t let you use that same username. It’s not that big of a deal, but it is just one more username to have to remember 🙂
After registering, you’re given a link to send to students or, as I have done, post in our class blog. Then students click on it and it leads them to a registration screen where they can register if they are new or log-in if they are a returning user. Once they registor or log-in, they are automatically sent to this screen:
It will show the name of their teacher and class. It’s nice that it automatically appears and the only thing the student has to do is click “Save Changes.” One glitch that I’m seeing is that the “Save Changes” box remains “grayed-out” until the student clicks the space bar a couple of times after the teacher’s email address. I’ve alerted Duolingo to the problem and am not sure if it is a widespread issue or just with me.
Once that’s done, the student can go to work and his/her word completed will show-up on the teacher’s dashboard, which looks like this:
It looks good, though I wish there was an FAQ that might help teachers who have questions about interpreting the information on the dashboard — a suggestion that I have also sent to Duolingo.
All in all, it looks pretty darn easy. All my students will be registering there tomorrow. I’ll let you know if there are any problems, but I don’t anticipate any. I think this will be a huge positive addition to language-learning. I’ve already told my students that most of their paper-based homework will be eliminated in favor of Duolingo and, I tell ya’, that announcement was met with hearty cheers 🙂
I’m very excited to use this in my ESL classroom, but I’m having trouble figuring out what language course for my students to use. Several of them speak non-mainstream languages, such as Somali, that aren’t included in their language courses, and I don’t see an “English for English learners” option or anything like that. Or am I just missing it? Any guidance would be greatly appreciated!
Good question. I don’t know — you’ll have to contact them. I’d love to hear what you find out!
I commented on the “Announcing Duolingo for Schools” post and have done some searching around the site, and all I’ve found is that if there’s not a supported language, they can contribute to the incubator (if there is one), or else they’re out of luck. Darn it, about half my students speak non-supported languages, so it looks like this is going to be a no-go for me.
That’s unfortunate. I’d encourage you to send in a suggestion
Can you use this site just for a teacher to learn spanish ??
Yes
I teach Spanish and so far i have registered three classes….I am not sure where I went wrong but all my student were placed in the same class…eventhought I had created three different classes in duolingo schools. It was a mess to try and move students into their respective classes.