I regularly learn how much I don’t know, and today was another example. I had never heard of Digital Learning Day before I received an email from The California Writing Project today. Here’s what it said:

Organized by the Alliance for Excellent Education, Digital Learning Day celebrates effective teaching and learning practices powered by technology. Each year, hundreds of thousands of teachers and education leaders, and millions of students from all fifty states and the District of Columbia join this grassroots movement in schools nationwide. From classroom activities to district-and statewide initiatives, Digital Learning Day events are diverse and unique and share the goals of encouraging innovation, supporting teachers, and spreading best practices for the use of technology in schools.

You can learn more about it at the Digital Learning Day site and/or at The California Writing Project.

You might also find some useful resources at The Best Resources For Connected Educators Month.

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