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:

duostudent

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:

duoduo

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 🙂