Duolingo

Duolingo is a free language learning tool. It also helps with the translation.

You can log in and start learning languages you would like to learn. Language choice depends on your mother tongue. If you are a native speaker of English, you have nine choices. However, if you are a native speaker of Korean, Chinese, Japanese, or Italian, etc., only English learning is provided. You can still choose English as your site language and learn languages in the list below.

Duolingo invites you to start learning. You can learn in your pace.

You can learn anywhere anytime as it is available on smartphones.

It can record the result of your learning and you can carry on your learning.

Duolingo is interactive. You can add your friends to compete with.

One of the problems is that it sometimes provides wired sentences or questions seem difficult because of the lack of context.

For example, when learning French, I encountered a question;

"Select the mission word.

________ sont des garçons."

I should choose a word from "Ce, Ils, Vous".

I got it wrong by selecting "Ils". The correct answer was "Ce".

However, when asked "select all correct answers",

the correct answer was "Ils sont des garçons."


This is a interesting learning tool. You will be provided with various types of questions. However, getting wrong answers because of the lack of context or relevant explanations could be sometimes frustrating.


Having said so, overall, I think this can help learners to study autonomously unless they don't get frustrated by some types of questions.


Here is the link to Duolingo.

https://en.duolingo.com/

SMARTNotebook

This is the software that comes with the interactive whiteboard from Smart Technologies. This is a very useful, interesting and interactive tool.The teacher can do a lot more things on the board and make the lesson more interesting, interactive and exciting.

Here is the link about how to use the SMARTNotebook provided by Russell Stannard.

http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/e-portfolios-iwbs/interactive-whiteboards.html


It will be surprising to see how many activities this tool makes accessible and realisable. This also provides teachers with opportunities to get students involved physically as well, which might help enhance language learning acquisition. The teacher can use the properties or images that are already installed or even add new things according to their needs.

As this is "interactive", it reacts to our action. We can move letters on the board, make them bigger or smaller. It is easy to write, put coulours, add some shapes or erase them. With the help of sounds, images or videos, this can provide an authentic context for language learning.

The biggest problem, I think, is all about facilities, whether the school/institution has rooms equipped to use SMARTNotebook in the classroom. As far as I know, it is quite impossible to have each room equipped. The teacher needs to carry a laptop, a projector and an interactive whiteboard and set them up before the class begins. It takes more than 5 minutes to be ready while there is only 10-minute break between classes. Furthermore, it is also unlikely that there is enough interactive whiteboards for each teacher to use.

Teacher training is another issue for this tool to be pervasive.

As for the target learners, I think this is more suitable for young learners than for elder learners when it is used to encourage them to interact or move their bodies.

Regarding the use of this, it will be likely that the teacher will tend to speak a lot as s/he is supposed to give instructions. However, it would be better if the teacher could invite students speak, express themselves in the target language.