The spirit of a teacher! I had all the family set up on DuoLingo to practice their English. Super fun!
Posted by Genna Rodriguez on Thursday, February 20, 2014
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Week One. Download apps. While I was familiar with what Duolingo was and how it worked, I had never used it for my OWN learning. Instead, I set my husband's family up with an account a couple years ago to help them with their English.
In the post above, perhaps I did have the spirit of a teacher (in a sense); but I did not have the spirit of a learner. Really and truly, teachers should be facilitators of learning, as well as learners themselves. In hindsight, I can see that I was unintentionally sending a message that they had something to learn, but I didn't. That evening, I should have been modelling what I was encouraging.
Here I am now: both ready and committed to improving my Spanish speaking/listening capacity. Over the past week and a half, I have been engaging with DuoLingo. I am typically not the biggest fan of "drill and practice" apps; I believe more in the "creation" apps/programs, where people can create new meaning of their learning to share with others. Like Michael Welsch says in his TED Talk, we need to move from being simply "knowledgeable to being knowledge-able"; I truly want to be knowledge-able in the Spanish language. Nevertheless, I am starting at ground zero here, and decided to give the drill and practice app a shot for my own learning. After engaging with the app, I can say with certainty that I have been improving. Over the past week and a half, you will notice that I have made it from ground zero to level seven! I still have a long way to go, and this will be just one of the many learning strategies I engage with to support me in my ultimate learning goal.
Duolingo helps you with goal-setting, increases your vocabulary, and gets you to focus on comprehending phrases (as opposed to just singular words on flashcards). I love that when I have down time, I can practice my Spanish, as the lessons are short and sweet. I'm also happy to have connected with other Spanish language learners, including my classmate Vanessa, to engage in the social aspect of learning a language. While I am enjoying seeing a visual progression of my learning using Duolingo, I am still not comfortable speaking in Spanish, as the program offers very little to develop this. That being said, the app will definitely help people with their writing and listening, but my ultimate goal is to develop my capacity for verbal expression. I have already been seeking ways to tap into that goal as I progress on my learning journey, and you will be hearing about it in later posts. In the coming weeks, I would love to make videos of my speaking in Spanish... but that will come as soon as I feel a bit more comfortable.
Below is a video of me using Duolingo.
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Genna RodriguezTeacher & Tech Coach with Regina Catholic Schools. Passion for EdTech, 21st century student-centered pedagogy, connected learning & differentiated instruction. Grad student. Categories
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