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Our goal with Duolingo is to provide the absolute best language learning service out there (and also make it 100% free!). In this post I want to talk about something that we believe is fundamental towards this goal: students must be able to read and write complete sentences and be given immediate detailed feedback about their answers. When we started working on Duolingo we noticed that most language learning methods outside of the classroom didn't do this. Some never provide you with any feedback (think of books or the audio tapes from the 1980s), while other more "interactive" ones only provide you with feedback on single words or multiple choice questions. As any educator will tell you, having students read and write complete sentences by themselves, and then get detailed feedback, is significantly better for learning.

"Use your voice to give students feedback about their papers in Google Docs. I've only played with this a little bit so far, but I'm really excited to be able to use Kaizena to give my students feedback this year. Being able to add links to resources and reuse those links for other students is so helpful."

"You are teaching a class and want to collect feedback at the beginning of the class to see whether everyone is on the same page. You can do tests, collect them and grade them, or you can use quizsocket. You get instanteneous feedback about problems. As a teacher you learn what was difficult to understand in the last class and can immediately react"

Simple alternative to response systems

"Give Great Feedback · Voice Comments for Google Drive. Giving feedback is faster with Kaizena than a word processor, and far faster than red pen"

"JISC page that provides ideas and resources to help colleges and universities enhance the entire assessment and feedback lifecycle." There are many transferable ideas for secondary school teachers.

"Highlight and Speak The fastest, simplest way to give high quality feedback on writing."

(via @rmbyrne)

"You can now give students voice feedback about their writing in Google Docs. This short video will show you how. You will need to teach students how to hit the comments button to access the link to your feedback."

A list of 8 good web tools that help to create instant polls. Useful for use with students as they do not require any registration. They would allow teachers to get some quick feedback about what has been learnt in the classroom and provide information for future lessons. 

You can now give students voice feedback about their writing in Google Docs.

"iTunes 11 is a huge upgrade from its predecessor, and it has received lots of positive feedback since it became available for download on Thursday, November 29th. Apple has baked iCloud into the core of iTunes, and the app's interface has been decluttered and enhanced with new features like the MiniPlayer. We've been combing through the innards of iTunes 11 to find all of the little changes and additions. Here's our updating list of iTunes 11 tips and tricks:"

"Doctopus is a Google Spreadsheet script developed by Andrew Stillman that can help teachers manage the flow of shared work in in their Google Drive accounts. The basic concept behind the script is to enable teachers to quickly share documents with all of the students on a roster, monitor usage of shared documents, and give students feedback within that roster spreadsheet."

"Two year 4 students from Winters Flat Primary School explain how they write, collaborate, receive feedback and share using Google Docs, one of the key communication tools of Google Apps for Education."

"Paul Hamilton presents 'Technology in Education', a creative and artistic look at the challenges edtech faces. Creator of the Science AR App, the critically acclaimed educational app Formative Feedback for Learning and the revolutionary iBook series My Prep Year, Paul is changing the way digital content is being delivered in schools."

Recently I have gotten a lot of feedback on my previous PBL posts, mainly asking me how I develop my PBL ideas.  So, I thought it might be a good idea to let everyone take a peek at the process I use to write my PBLs.  Just be warned that I haven't yet perfected the art of crafting a PBL yet, but hopefully some of this will help you in any PBL writing you may do.

Another PEW report, this time into gamification "Tech stakeholders and analysts generally believe the use of game mechanics, feedback loops, and rewards will become more embedded in daily life by 2020, but they are split about how widely the trend will extend. Some say the move to implement more game elements in networked communications will be mostly positive, aiding education, health, business, and training. Some warn it can take the form of invisible, insidious behavioral manipulation. "The development of 'Serious Games' applied productively to a wide scope of human activities will accelerate simply because playing is more fun than working," observed Mike Liebhold, senior researcher and distinguished fellow at The Institute for the Future."

"CodingBat is a free site of live coding problems to build coding skill in Java, and now in Python (example problem), created by Nick Parlante who is computer science lecturer at Stanford. The coding problems give immediate feedback, so it's an opportunity to practice and solidify understanding of the concepts. The problems could be used as homework, or for self-study practice, or in a lab, or as live lecture examples."

"Its well known that giving easy digital content creation tools into the hands of more teachers and students is a great way to encourage focus on higher order thinking skills in the curriculum. For schools with Macs and iPads, the release of Apple's iBooks Author software in January made this even more possible. Attached to this post is 1.0 draft of a 'know-why' guide to using iBooks Author to make digital content thats localised and personalised just for your students. Download and enjoy, plus leave comments if you have questions or feedback. To load, just download directly onto an iPad with iBooks 2 installed, and tap 'open in iBooks', or download to your PC and sync via iTunes."

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