How to use Duolingo in your world language classroom

Today’s post is about this fantastic free app called Duolingo. It is a wonderful tool for differentiation, especially for your high-achievers who always finish early!  

What is Duolingo?

Duolingo is a free online tool to learn language. It teaches students through a series of mini-lessons and tracks their progress. Mini-lessons include skills across all 4 domains of language.  Students can learn more than one language at a time!

When a student completes a lesson, the level turns gold.  As time goes on, the gold bars fade to encourage students to go back to review and strengthen old lessons. They get a bar graph that shows their weekly Experience Points (XP) and they get points for both completing new levels and strengthening old ones.

The other incentive is called Lingots.  These are tokens that they can accumulate to “buy” items such as outfits for their Duolingo Owl or other special lessons such as idioms or flirting!

How I use it in my classroom

• Students create an account and join my class:

• Teacher Tutorial Video – Setting up your dashboard
• Teacher Tutorial Video – Student set-up

Daily:  This is their bellringer. (No prep!!) I set a timer that covers the passing period and the first 5 minutes of class. Students are motivated to get to my class on time (or even early) so they have extra Duolingo time!  When the buzzer goes off, they know to put away their device so we can begin class.  

Fridays: Students begin a drumroll and I project the teacher dashboard to announce the winner each week. We select the winner by the amount of XP points, because this totals how many minutes they spent practicing, including review.  They are encouraged to play outside of class too!

Extra Credit: Duolingo is the only way to earn extra credit in my class now.  Students can play outside of class on their home computer or on their smartphone. For every 100 XP points earned, they receive 1 point of extra credit. They max out at 10 points a quarter.

Competition

I have a bulletin board in my room entitled “Duolingüista” (This is the Spanish word I came up with for “duolingo-er”) and each class has a scoreboard where we write the winner’s name and their XP total. (Download here)  My weekly winner also gets a prize, and I have included the prize board poster in the download as well. (Update: My students gave the feedback that they started losing interest when the same kids kept winning and thought the top 3 winners should get prizes, so that is what we do now.)

Helpful Tools for Classroom Management

• Students in my school have their own Chromebooks, but I also let them bring their phone to class because we have found that the speaking activities work better on their phone.  If I see their phone at any other point during class, I take it directly to the office with no warning, so I have not had any problems yet!
• I let students use Duolingo when they finish other work early.  This must be done on their computer though, not their phone.  Phones can only be used during the first few minutes of class when I can monitor everyone.
• Encourage students to use headphones to cut down on the noise. The program speaks to them and has other sounds throughout.
• Options for prizes:
  • Homework pass
  • Sitting in the teacher chair or another “cool” chair
  • ​Candy
  • Dollar store prizes

​The best part about this app is that the Duolingo staff is so receptive and supportive of feedback.  They have made some great updates within the past year alone that make it even easier to track your student’s progress using their Dashboard feature. This tool has become a hugely effective and motivating force within my classroom!