Great Websites for Parents
Click here for the CT State Department of Education's World Language page with links to information about standards, data, enrollment and more.
Click here for an article about what parents can do to help students who are learning a second (or third) language.
Here is some information about three online language learning courses which could be used during the summer vacation or during the school year for students who are passionate about learning Spanish or any other language.
Enter solutions like Duolingo, Lingua.ly and Bliu Bliu — platforms that go out of the way to present learners with comprehensible input they actually have a chance of holding on to. Duolingo does it on the sentence level, Lingua.ly takes the whole article approach and Bliu Bliu offers a combination geared at suggesting spoken and informal language from the web. All of them rely on powerful technology to map each user’s unique vocabulary in a language and keep a self-adjusting feedback loop in place to generate a stream of targeted, smart content, tailored to the individual. All of them neglect to directly teach grammar.
Duolingo is certainly the most famous of the three. They’ve developed a closed system whereby texts up for translation from their community of advanced learners are turned into fodder for thematic lessons, monetizing the platform in the process. While Duolingo handpicks its text, Lingua.ly takes an alternative approach, tracking user click patterns as they surf the open web. Users direct their learning to start off by looking up words from foreign language websites (creating a trail of electronic flashcards in the process) until the system learns their level and suggests targeted reading with the right mix of words they’ve seen and new language that’s within their reach. Bliu Bliu, the youngest of the group, is a 1-year-old startup from Lithuania that uses the same idea as Lingua.ly. They sort their videos and dialogues into content buckets and have users complete drills where they ask “do you know this word?” for select highlighted text until enough information is generated to send appropriate content the user’s way.
Click here for an article about what parents can do to help students who are learning a second (or third) language.
Here is some information about three online language learning courses which could be used during the summer vacation or during the school year for students who are passionate about learning Spanish or any other language.
Enter solutions like Duolingo, Lingua.ly and Bliu Bliu — platforms that go out of the way to present learners with comprehensible input they actually have a chance of holding on to. Duolingo does it on the sentence level, Lingua.ly takes the whole article approach and Bliu Bliu offers a combination geared at suggesting spoken and informal language from the web. All of them rely on powerful technology to map each user’s unique vocabulary in a language and keep a self-adjusting feedback loop in place to generate a stream of targeted, smart content, tailored to the individual. All of them neglect to directly teach grammar.
Duolingo is certainly the most famous of the three. They’ve developed a closed system whereby texts up for translation from their community of advanced learners are turned into fodder for thematic lessons, monetizing the platform in the process. While Duolingo handpicks its text, Lingua.ly takes an alternative approach, tracking user click patterns as they surf the open web. Users direct their learning to start off by looking up words from foreign language websites (creating a trail of electronic flashcards in the process) until the system learns their level and suggests targeted reading with the right mix of words they’ve seen and new language that’s within their reach. Bliu Bliu, the youngest of the group, is a 1-year-old startup from Lithuania that uses the same idea as Lingua.ly. They sort their videos and dialogues into content buckets and have users complete drills where they ask “do you know this word?” for select highlighted text until enough information is generated to send appropriate content the user’s way.