Mrs. U.'s Blog

Robins voraciously sing outside my living room window. The blinding spring sun plays hide-and-seek behind the fluffiest of white clouds. Daffodils yawn from a long sleep as a row of pink hyacinths peeks for assurance that it is indeed time to bloom. It is in fact the dawning of spring, and it is truly the dawning of an inevitable twist in learning that most K-12 educators have yet to experience. It is a digital dawning. My alerts overflowed this week with articles offering free resources, tools, and subscriptions for remote learning: Storylineonline, Khan Academy, PBS Kids, Rosetta Stone, Scholastic, Duolingo, Discovery K-12, Readworks, to name just a few. School districts in different spots across the country were featured in writings to not only prepare the public with their instructional plans but to also inform of the uncertainty of what we as teachers and students will all face in the upcoming weeks as we navigate distance learning. I have been using Schoology as my classroo...

"Beyond Local: What if emojis and hashtags should be part of language learning?"  Professor Heather Lotherington, Multilingual Education and Associate Dean at York University in Canada, asks: "Why don't we teach languages the way we actually use them?" As an experienced secondary English teacher and certified reading and ELD specialist, I shake my head both north and south and east and west in response to this question. In her article, Lotherington points her finger at "free or cheap" second language learning apps - particularly Duolingo, Busuu, Babbel, and Memrise - of "focusing on old-school grammar." According to Lotherington, these app push too much skill-and-drill, particularly with syntax and morphology. Instead, Lotherington wants a greater focus to be placed on other components of digital literacy, identified as "cross-linguistic elements" and otherwise known as hashtags, emojis, and SMS (short message service abbreviati...

"Tired of Duolingo? Here are 5 more apps to help you learn a new language" by Lindsay Hoffman of FOX17 https://www.fox17online.com/morning-mix/tired-of-duolingo-here-are-5-more-apps-to-help-you-learn-a-new-language Strangely coincidental. While combing through my alerts, I heard the echo of Student A from my first period ELA class today: "I'll just use Duolingo. I am soooooooo tired of Duolingo." My class and I had been discussing the question: "Should foreign language courses be offered in middle school?" This was one of 15 questions that I had generated in order to introduce The Argument module, and students were learning how to write claims based on their personal opinions. Student A happened to sit right beside me, and upon hearing his distress, I asked, "Why are you soooooooo tired of Duolingo?" He replied, "Because my mom makes me do it allllllll the timmmmmmmme." About ten years ago when my district was in the thr...