Duolingo Challenge: Our implementation of Duolingo in our school

I work in a public school, which is located in a rural town of El Salvador. One of my goals was to implement projects that would benefit students. Ever since I was assigned to work there, my priority was to teach everything I know. You see, right after high school I was awarded a full scholarship to attend a college in the United States of America. It was the most amazing experience in my life. When I finally returned to my home country, one of my goals was to help my country become a better place. That's the main reason why I started the most ambitious project of this past year: Duolingo Challenge

What is the "Duolingo Challenge"? It was a project which involved 160 students from seventh grade to ninth grade. The aim was to improve their English level, by integrating Duolingo to the learning process. I didn't intend to replace regular classes with Duolingo. The purpose of the project was to use Duolingo alongside regular English classes. So, in essence, students were going to attend the Duolingo classes for an hour a week. I've read several threads on Reddit about replace regular English classes completely and just use Duolingo. We need to understand that people don't learn at the same pace we do, and need extra help to understand things. If we were to teach only with this platform, we will see a performance decrease because of the complexity of some of the Duolingo classes.

The project started in May. The first three weeks were extremely hard, because the majority of the students did not know how to use a computer, let alone open a website or how to use a username and a password. So, before getting into Duolingo, 160 students had to participate in basic IT training that was done by me. It was an exhausting job, but after two weeks they were able to do basic computer tasks.

Three weeks after the project started, we were right on board using Duolingo. There were some minor issues, such as one time Duolingo was down, or when we didn't have an stable Internet connection thanks to the storms. Just regular problems that you encounter when you start any project, nothing that would stop me from continuing teaching using Duolingo.

Two months later, I decided students were ready to test everything they learned using Duolingo. I co-developed a learning platform called "PiGo LMS", which I used to create an online courses for each grade where they were going to be tested. I created a multiple choice online test with 50 questions to evaluate the first three lessons. I was extremely surprised by the results of the first test, because 90% of the students evaluated got an A, 5% got a B+, 4% got a B- and just 1% got a C+ 

After making students take three more online evaluations, I sat down with the regular English professor to discuss the progress and compare grades from this year and last year. After graphing grades, we came up with the conclusion that Duolingo made a positive impact in the learning process. Not only that, we were able to bring innovation  and technology to the classroom, something that was never done before.

Do I recommend Duolingo for your school?

Yes and No.

Even though we had a very positive experience, you cannot just force Duolingo into the classroom. You need to be aware of the computer skills of your students. Besides that, one of the things that Duolingo lacks is a "Super Extra Beginner" lesson. The first three lessons students are bombarded with new words that are hard to understand. Not only that, numbers and locations are not listed as an independent lesson, so the student must have some sort of English knowledge.

If you have students from Jr. High or High School, go ahead and use Duolingo right now! It will be the perfect addition to your regular classes and you can actually see the progress of the students. Duolingo will help your students to become more knowledgeable of the English language (or any other language).  It will not make them fluent, but it will help them built an excellent foundation to become fluent in another language.

Got any questions? Ask!