Check Out the New Courses and New Features of Duolingo

Duolingo is a fantastic free service designed to help students learn Spanish, English, French, Italian, German, and Portuguese. The service can be used in your web browser, as an iOS app, or as an Android app. Earlier today Larry Ferlazzo made me aware of some new course options in Duolingo. Duolingo now offers courses for speakers of Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian, and Hindi to learn to speak English. The courses are not yet featured on the Duolingo homepage. To find the new courses you need to go to the Duolingo Incubator page which is where all new courses are beta tested.

After looking at the new course offerings on the Duolingo Incubator page I spent some time looking at the Duolingo blog to see if there were other updates that I've missed. Since the last time that I looked at Duolingo a new "language coach" and virtual shop had been added to the Duolingo iOS app. The Duolingo Language Coach is a feature that will tell you how many points you need in order to move to the next level in your lesson. The points that you earn not only move you along to the next level, they can also be redeemed for prizes in the virtual shop. The prizes are costumes and accessories for your Duolingo avatar.

If you haven't see Duolingo before, watch the video below for a short overview.

ePals is Now Cricket Media

If you use ePals, a popular service for connecting classrooms, you may have recently noticed a slight change to their branding. ePals is now a part of Cricket Media. The ePals services aren't changing and for now you can still get to everything by going to ePals.com. Alternatively, you can now go to Cricket Media to access ePals and all of Cricket Media's other services.

Online 3D Models of Molecules

Canvas Mol is a website that provides 3D, interactive, rotating models of simple and complex molecules. There are more than fifty models of relatively common molecules like glucose, fructose, and morphine. Each model can be altered to show or not show bonds, to show or not show individual atoms, and to rotate on the X,Y, or Z axis. Canvas Mol works best in Chrome or Opera, but it can also be used in Firefox and Safari.

Applications for Education
Canvas Mol could be a great resource for chemistry and biology teachers and students. Teachers can manipulate the models to include or not include all parts of the model. Teachers could choose to not display one element of the model and challenge students to identify the molecule.

The Mathematics of Rock Climbing

The Math of Rock Climbing is a neat video that could be used to incorporate a mathematics lesson into a physical education class. The high school in my district has a ropes course that the students use during physical education classes. If your school has the same or there is a rock climbing gym in your area that you can take students to, you have an opportunity to have students physically experience mathematics. Watch the video below.

Go Social Studies Go - A Good Alternative to Social Studies Textbooks

Go Social Studies Go is a nice site developed by Kenneth Udhe, a social studies teacher in Michigan, for his students and the world. Go Social Studies Go is essentially a series of multimedia books about common social studies topics. The site is divided into three main sections; U.S. History, World History, and World Religions. Click to open a book then click to open a chapter in the each of the books. Within each chapter there is a series of pages containing text, pictures, videos, and links to additional resources on your chosen topic.

Applications for Education
Go Social Studies Go could be an excellent resource for middle school social studies teachers. For the topics covered, there is as much content area information as you'll see in a typical textbook plus your students can access multimedia elements for the topics they're reading about. For high school students, the Go Social Studies Go content offers a nice refresher on many topics.

Disclosure: Go Social Studies Go is currently an advertiser on Free Technology for Teachers. That said, I initially wrote about the site three years ago when I was using parts of it with my own students.