Learning a Foreign Language

The Furious Five had ambitious goals for their learning activity asking the students to learn a foreign language, prepare a travel itinerary, learn a new piece of technology, and write paragraphs in the foreign language about all of this. The developed a wonderful learning cite that would guide us students throughout this journey. I shared the Busuu.com site with our foreign language teacher in order to provide another tool for their tool box to use at school.

Some of the aspects of their LA I really enjoyed were the number of interactive and informative tutorials to assist the learner throughout this adventure. The tutorials working your way through Busuu was helpful and necessary so that time could be concentrated on the assignment itself. Also, I really enjoyed all the mapping their website provided. Whenever you had a question, there was a point of reference that could be found on the website to answer your question.

Challenges included the scope of the assignment. I felt for a one week assignment, this activity was well beyond what you would learn or be able to do in a classroom. The time just to make it through the tutorials, and writing paragraphs was considerable. I am just unsure of how realistic the assignment was.

Overall, I was glad at the variety within the activity. I could take the learning as far as I was interested in pursuing and I think that is essential with a large activity such as this. I wish there was more participation in the discussion boards when I reacted to my participation in order to conduct more of a dialogue. What I was impressed by and influenced my approach to my LA was how attentive the leaders were to your answers. I took away their attentiveness and applied it to my groups LA.