Duolingo Test Drive

I tested Duolingo to brush up on my Spanish language skills. I was impressed with how user-friendly the interface was and how quickly I was able to begin practicing Spanish. I would think that could be useful for social work students who are going to be engaging with Spanish-speakers but may not want to take formal classes any longer. This would be an easy thing to incorporate in to a learning module if it were appropriate. The other tools looked interesting as well and the flashcard options would be helpful too for learning terminology, vocabulary and theories. I'm wondering how these could be useful in graduate courses?

Guiding reading

I have been convicted in the last year or so to try to be intentional in guiding how my students read. Joe did a good job of shaping our expectations for the reading of Chapter 2 in Conquering the Content  by acknowledging that there are some more outdated aspects that we may not find helpful. However, he also signaled to us what he thought was important about the reading. Once I read that short introduction, I knew how to best approach the chapter--it was a few short sentences and yet it set a clear direction.  In the online setting, I can see how important it is for the instructor to frame or give cues about how the readings fit into the topic for the week. When I think of all of the "casual" framing I do in a F2F class especially at the beginning of the class period, I worry that I would fail to do this to the same level in an online course. But maybe if I'm intentional enough, this framing and connecting that is included in all aspects of the week's module can become even more influential as its reinforced in a number of settings--video lectures, assignments, expectations for the reading assignments, etc.