Let’s be honest. Habits are not the easiest things to make — especially the tiny ones. Why? Maybe subconsciously we don’t think they are important enough. Maybe we keep sacrificing them for bigger, more important tasks and they never get to be formed. Or maybe we just don’t think we have the headspace. Whatever the reason is, one thing is for certain: If we don’t build these habits, we don’t reap their benefits. And I speak as a performer and a former medical student, whose life has been drastically changed for the better by these 4 habits below: A Full Glass of Water Upon Getting Up This is the first thing I do every morning. A full glass of room...
Since 1997, the Diefenbunker Museum of Cold War history has occupied a 100,000-square-foot bunker just outside the Canadian capital of Ottawa. Commissioned in 1959 to become the heart of government in case of a nuclear attack, the bunker had a device designed to measure fall-out levels outside, to let evacuated government officials know when it was safe to emerge. Ahead of some planned renovations last year, the museum hired a specialist to check for any radiation coming from the device itself. It turned out to be perfectly safe. But while there, the contractor turned up something more dangerous. “It was a cream-colored jar with a lid,” said the museum’s Sean Campbell. “You could go over to your grandmother's house and...
Consider This has mostly been an exploration of resources used a bunch of different ways, but we also can consider how different curriculum topics can be used to target many speech and language and social communication objectives (and in this case, some resources that go with this idea). Speech and language pathologists can wrap interventions in contexts; check out this recent study, one that I'd like to describe in detail at some point, on science and Tier 2 vocabulary.I think of civics as important world and social knowledge. Though it's unlikely to fix everything, we could do worse than helping students understand how government and laws work. Within civics contexts, there's much opportunity to target narrative, expository language, reading comprehension,...
Every year, millions of Duolingo learners get better and better at understanding and using a new language. Meanwhile, inside Duolingo, teams are working to get better and better at teaching a new language. This year, we made several exciting improvements to how we teach grammar in many of our courses. See our biggest updates below, and then try them out in the app! We added Grammar Skills to many of our courses Late last year, we introduced Grammar Skills, exercises devoted entirely to helping learners understand grammar rules. Grammar Skills don’t introduce new vocabulary and instead focus on clarifying the rules around tenses, verb usage, sentence structure, and other tricky concepts. In 2021, we added Grammar Skills to 20 units...
With accessibility features on Chromebooks, we want everyone to have a good experience on their computer – so people can get things done, families can play together, students and teachers can learn together, and employees can work productively and efficiently, wherever they are. October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month, so we wanted to share a few recent and new Chromebook features that help people access information in a way that works for them. New enhanced voices for Select-to-speak People spend a lot of time reading on their laptop, doing things like reading news articles or reviewing school textbooks. Reading on a screen can be less than ideal for many, including people with dyslexia (an estimated 10-20% of the population),...
