Rosetta Stone in Schools
Rating: 1 out of 10
IncentivizedUse Cases and Deployment Scope
Rosetta Stone is used in my district for World Language classes for middle school and high school students. It offers a learning management platform and offers the capability of students choosing languages more than just what our teachers know and are qualified to teach.
Pros
- Tracks user interaction
- Customer service availability
- Accessibility
Cons
- My students get furiously angry with the poor quality of voice recognition.
- The target language structures, scope and sequence of the program is not comprehensible. The program does not offer explanations for how to properly create phrases nor does the program accept varieties of an expression (so you have to be word for word rote in order to be granted credit). For example, the program would not accept equivalent phrases like "On Wednesdays I run" and "I run on Wednesdays" which would be OK in typical communication. Additionally, the program was initially deemed desirable because students could learn at their own pace, but I never really saw take away learning as a result of using Rosetta Stone but instead students were able to mimic sounds and click the "hint" button for answers to get through modules.
- Students don't find the curriculum particularly engaging, which may not be as much a reflection on the product but rather how it is being used in it's application at my school.
- It would be nice if it could run in some sort of "lockdown browser" capacity because I find students open various web tabs for music and google translate just to get through the program. They're more worried about completion than the practice toward learning...and the poor speech recognition will pick up utterances that aren't even close to the target phrase while often not accepting genuine attempts at the phrase, so there isn't a lot of fidelity from students to trying to use the program.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think that Rosetta Stone would be best suited for someone looking to refresh their language skills after already having learned the language at some point, but has not been a particularly fruitful initial experience to foreign language learning.