How do I introduce my students to Linguachet?

I teach with a woman I admire a great deal.  She is a master at growing deep, lasting bonds with her

students.  Not only does this make her effective while teaching them, but she has a continual stream of former students stopping in for years after she has taught them, particularly at this time of year.

Her example is teaching me that all teaching happens through relationship.  If this is true, it's not just what what we do in a classroom that matters; how we do it matters even more.  Maybe sometimes, in our eagerness to bolt on a magical new teaching tool or method, we forget this relational context that colors everything we do.  And if we do that, then we may be puzzled and frustrated at the results we get.

With this relational context in mind, I'd like to offer three things you can tell your students about Linguachet. 

1. The point of Linguachet is to help you teach yourself, something even more important than Latin per se.  As your teacher, I'm very interested in helping you do that.
2. Nobody's perfect...but we can all get better. Learning from our own mistakes can help us a lot.  It's not where we start that matters.  It's where we finish.
3. Linguachet will never be perfect either.  It can make mistakes.  But if it helps us learn from our mistakes, then it will USEFUL to us.

An amazing former boss had the following sign on her door: "People may doubt what you say, but they will always believe what you do."   So, once I say these things, students will be watching to see if I mean them. 

Used purely as an electronic taskmaster, Linguachet would become a source of drudgery.  Used simply as a way to test and assign grades, it would become a source of anxiety.  Presented and used as a helper, though, it can become a source of gratitude.  

With our task environment in mind, I'd like to offer a few tips for using Linguachet with students.

1. Personalize assignments:  Now that it's easier to do, you can either differentiate or offer students choices wherever it makes sense.
2. Slash busywork:  You can tell students what you want them to learn, encouraging them to skip unneeded units or questions where appropriate.
3. Roam the room and coach:  Since students are now looking up basics
   on their own, you may be able to focus your attention toward a smaller number of students who need it.  If you're carrying your iPad, refresh your results tab and see who's logging lots of attempts.
4. Explore results:  If you didn't have to grade an assignment, why not use a fraction of the time saved to click through the results and explore how each student is learning?  Over time, what I noticed started to change my beliefs about teaching.  
5. Experiment with assessment:  Often I gave simple completion grades, only to find the students driving themselves toward 100% accuracy anyway. Sometimes I assigned several units at once, but told students to choose no more than 50% of the questions in each.  I also experimented with letting students choose between taking a quiz and doing Linguachet.  Students' insights helped me understand what I was seeing and decide how to respond.

If you think about it, these are all best practices anyway; they're just a bit easier to do now!  Maybe we can experience renaissance in the art of teaching as we refocus ourselves on the things that ONLY teachers can do.

Finally, passionate teachers never fully agree.  Maybe you'll even disagree with at least one thing that I've said above and give me some pushback in the comments!