Malaysian Teachers & Education

Over the last weeks, I have been attempting to learn German through various different interfaces. Some have been a huge improvement to how I learned previously, some can be helpful in particular ways, and some just aren’t for me at all. This post shares a little of my experience using both Busuu and LiveMocha. The reason I’m reviewing them together is that I find both their advantages and their disadvantages to be very broadly similar, even if the actual systems are very different and present different types of interfaces. I’ll start with how I think these can be useful and then say where I feel they fall short.

A few of the sites I came across were solely for finding teachers, some did not offer any or much free material, and a few were almost exactly what I was looking for. Another aspect of modern language learning that I was hoping to find on these sites was portability – if they offered downloads of audio and text so I did not have to sit at a computer with an internet connection in order to study.  For those of us who work all day long at a computer, the thought of only using a computer to study languages isn’t exactly enticing.  For these reasons, and the fact that I was focusing on German and Italian, my top three choices are Busuu.com, Livemocha.com and Lingq.com, while Hello-Hello.com gets an honorable mention (but mostly because they don’t currently offer German.)

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A Lifelong Learner Shares Thoughts About Education

First, pick a thinking skill... Revised Bloom's Taxonomy adapted from "A Taxonomy for Learning,Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives" by Anderson and Krathwohl

Next, pick a way to differentiate content... Depth and Complexity adapted from The Flip Book by Sandra N. Kaplan, Bette Gould & Victoria Siegel. Content Imperatives adapted from The Flip Book, Too by Sandra Kaplan & Bette Gould.

Now, pick a resource...