By Tyler Ulrich (guest blogger)

Language education is competing against other industries for $100,000

The Loogla language and literacy project may be awarded $100,000 in a grant competition. Watch the video and spread
the word!

voteliteracy.com
No logins, age or national restictions to vote. Please support language education through voting and sharing this video.

About Loogla

Not everyone has a gift for language, and many get a late start. Even the most well-intentioned and earnest late-bloomers often quit from frustration shortly after they plateau.

The Loogla project, a portmanteau of Looking Glass Language in honor of Lewis Carroll’s contributions to the playful exploration of language, promises a way to try again and finally achieve their goals.

Loogla turns any material on the web into activities and guidance contributed by an community of instructors. The intent is to empower learners to be active in their own acquisition process, without putting other aspects of their lives on hold. One of our simpler, but beloved, tools is Smart Syntax. For example, ELL students reading Create Your World Book could instantly encode this page with shapes and colors to make the grammar (gender, number, tense, mood) more intuitive. The page also becomes interactive and let users create flashcards using the words and images from the page and from the web. Loogla’s most unique tool feature are the rich activities ranging from simple topics, such as which preposition to choose to use in a sentence, to more immersive activities including videos where instructors quiz the learners about elements of the text they are reading. The activities incorporate the language of the page itself, creating a connection between skill building and personal interests. That crucial engagement in the materials is the best predictor of whether they’ll will keep at it.

This represents a big leap in passion-based learning for language enthusiasts. Current options for enhanced reading of the web consist primarily of translations drills or a limited selection of stock articles. One couldn’t, for example, follow breaking news.

Loogla recognizes thousands of atomic learning topics in a given web page and identifies which of them a student is learning in the moment. Once found, the application inserts the most highly rated instructor contributed activities into the language of the page without ever leaving the page. Each activity represents a mini-portfolio for the instructor, and students can connect with the instructors for more help right from their activities.

As students progress, more advanced groups of topics are unlocked so return visits to the same page are always a new experience, and the host of tools assist with concepts beyond the learner’s current reach.

Loogla is being beta-tested for Spanish language acquisition (sign up at Loogla.com), but new languages are in the works. The future of Loogla also includes ways to interact with media such as music and video. We’ll also adapt the concept to adolescent literacy where it promises to make flip teaching principles more effective by allowing learners to pursue their own interests, both inside and out of the classroom, while acquiring language skills.

 

We’re the only educational company in the running, so vote Loogla if you think that education matters!

Support Loogla’s bid for the $100,000 grant competition in the State of Nevada! voteliteracy.com

DISCLAIMER: Susanna Zaraysky, the owner of this blog, has not tried out Loogla. Nor does she endorse the website. This is a guest blog post by the founders of Loogla.