LearnThat's Blog

LearnThat's Blog

Rosevita Warda  //  Founder and Executive Director of LearnThat Foundation, the nonprofit behind http://www.LearnThat.org.
Published author, single parent of an awesome daughter.
I'm interested in social entrepreneurship, water dance, fascinated by how the brain learns, thinks, remembers, and forgets.

 
May 24 / 9:12am

The problem with feedback, and a fast turn

We have feedback buttons, social media channels, live chat support... we love to hear from our visitors, because it helps us make LTW the best it can be. We care a lot for your feedback!

There's a problem with feedback, though. Most people will tell you what they DO NOT like. Very few people give feedback when they actually DO like something.

For the last eight years we had been listening to people who wanted LTW's adaptive, personalized vocabulary tutoring, yet without the spelling component. Making an intelligent multiple-choice/matching quiz for a data foundation of 180,000 words was, as can be easily imagined, a substantial challenge, and took a great development effort. I will share some of the unique difficulties we had to overcome in another blog.

So when we finally launched the new vocabulary quiz alongside our traditional spelling quiz, we were excited -- and surprised by the outcry of our members! Shows that the OLD vocabulary quiz had a solid fan following, and chat, email, and phone lit up!

Luckily, the old functionality had been preserved and could easily be resurrected. Now you have the choice between the free vocabulary quiz and two additional quiz forms with spelling integrated. 

In the new/old Combo quiz, you are first challenged to choose the right word based on definition and sample sentence and actively enter it in the text field. If you manage to get it right without listening to the audio, you earn an extra bonus word nugget for more rewards. 

Not a premium member? Every free member gets 5 Pay-Per-Result tokens at sign up.
Take a few premium quizzes and check it out!

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May 23 / 2:22pm

Stoked, excited, and thrilled!

Hurray, the new website is finally live! The new updates have been a great challenge for our small (yet savvy) team. 
What's new? Our own collaborative multi-media OPEN DICTIONARY OF ENGLISH, for one. 180,000 entries, with strong focus on learning and providing usage based information. Video snippets, audio from around the world, images, hundreds of usage examples, definitions from different sources, idioms, tutoring comments, images, translations... the list goes on and on!

We also now offer quizzes that make the spelling aspect optional (meaning-based choices). I will blog about the underlying technology in the future, when I have a bit more time at hand.

Oh, and did you notice that we offer FREE tutoring now? Not just free trial, but free FREE? 

Let us know what you think! And stay tuned, since lots of new updates are already in the works. Now that the major site transition is over, add-ons and upgrades will happen on a daily basis again, so keep those ideas and feedback coming!

 
Dec 10 / 11:56pm

LearnThatWord on Edmodo!

We're delighted to join the Edmodo community!
If you're an Edmodo teacher or student, please join us:
 
Dec 1 / 9:21pm

Under beautiful skies...

My daughter celebrating with her Dog, Mowgli.

 
Nov 3 / 7:02pm

Voices of Literacy

A beautiful movie about what it means to be comfortable with language and literacy:

 
Oct 7 / 11:58pm

Cloudflare rocks

Sure, I'd be happy to. You're providing an amazing service :-)Rosie

On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 9:31 PM, Michelle Zatlyn <michelle@cloudflare.com> wrote:
Thanks so much for the detailed feedback. Our entire team really appreciates it! 

We are in the middle of creating various case studies. If you are willing, we would like to turn this into one showcasing your website. Are you open to that? If so, we will create a first pass with this information and then share it with you for your feedback and input. 

Thank you again for taking the time to send this to us!
Michelle


On Oct 7, 2011, at 7:48 PM, eSpindle Learning <info@espindle.org> wrote:

I normally don't post much about the webmastering of LearnThat, but what we recently experienced is so dramatic that I wanted to share it with you.
Like I do regularly, I logged into my analytics and so this:
A drastic jump in page views. People from one day to the next viewed three times more pages on my site.

<Picture 210.png>
At the same time, the bounce rate, number of people who leave the site on the first page (which used to be too high) dropped to less than a third:
<Picture 211.png>
Overall, the number of visitors more about doubled.

<Picture 213.png>

Of course, I was delighted! It's rare to see such a drastic improvement, not to mention within a day's time.

When looking at the different things that had changed, and also considering the spike in the middle of September, I found out that we owe big thanks to Cloudflare.
Cloudflare is a new service and I had met Michelle at a local meetup. What she presented seemed too good to be true, but these graphs prove that Cloudflare is very well worth the very low price. 

Cloudflare applies a set of services that help your website in many different ways, but the main one is speed.
By caching the static parts of the site on servers all over the world, the load time is reduced so dramatically that improvements like the ones above materialize!
Now that my site is fast and snappy, I actually get to welcome all the visitors who come to us, and they have a much better experience, engaging and reading more, and no longer leaving frustrated by some extra seconds in load time.

Thanks, Cloudflare, keep up the great work!! 
And thanks for making your outstanding service available and affordable to small organizations like ourselves!
 
Oct 7 / 7:49pm

Cloudflare rocks

I normally don't post much about the webmastering of LearnThat, but what we recently experienced is so dramatic that I wanted to share it with you.
Like I do regularly, I logged into my analytics and so this:
A drastic jump in page views. People from one day to the next viewed three times more pages on my site.

Picture_210
At the same time, the bounce rate, number of people who leave the site on the first page (which used to be too high) dropped to less than a third:
Picture_211
Overall, the number of visitors more about doubled.

Picture_213

Of course, I was delighted! It's rare to see such a drastic improvement, not to mention within a day's time.

When looking at the different things that had changed, and also considering the spike in the middle of September, I found out that we owe big thanks to Cloudflare.
Cloudflare is a new service and I had met Michelle at a local meetup. What she presented seemed too good to be true, but these graphs prove that Cloudflare is very well worth the very low price. 

Cloudflare applies a set of services that help your website in many different ways, but the main one is speed.
By caching the static parts of the site on servers all over the world, the load time is reduced so dramatically that improvements like the ones above materialize!
Now that my site is fast and snappy, I actually get to welcome all the visitors who come to us, and they have a much better experience, engaging and reading more, and no longer leaving frustrated by some extra seconds in load time.

Thanks, Cloudflare, keep up the great work!! 
And thanks for making your outstanding service available and affordable to small organizations like ourselves!
 
Sep 2 / 7:28pm

I believe that education is the civil rights issue of our generation.

 ... And if you care about promoting opportunity and reducing inequality, the classroom is the place to start.”
~ Secretary Arne Duncan, October 9, 2009. 

... or maybe the Internet? Our schools are failing our students... personalized learning coupled with Open and Social can turn this around!

 
Sep 2 / 4:01pm

Vocabulary automaticity is the goal

Most vocabulary programs are tiring, arduous, and ... completely ineffective.
The reason: "Teaching" a word is not enough. Learning vocabulary is only to a limited degree a rational process, and largely a pattern-building, practice-based process. And for practice to be effective, it requires follow up in a personalized manner until the student has really gained automaticity.

Automaticity is a term used in neuroscience that describes a moment when you no longer have to think to retrieve knowledge, it's hardwired into your mind, so you can use it effortlessly and easily, without stopping to think about it.

Vocabulary more than anything else requires automaticity to be of value.  At LearnThatWord its what we focus on all day long. The goal is to help learners build automaticity quickly and effectively, and the new upgrade will add more quiz modules that focus on usage and meaning of words, and lots of colorful, fun ways to interact with words.

Everyone at LearnThat.org is very excited about taking the new quiz for a first spin: it's fun and nicely addictive!
 
Jul 19 / 1:45pm

The learning schedule

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance.
Friedrich Nietzsche