Rosetta Stone Language Learning Software vs. Taskstream-Tk20 (discontinued)

While there are things that Rosetta Stone could do to help the teachers and district with providing educational data, I have seen a tremendous improvement in many beginning ELLs. This program has given them the confidence to move from silence in the classroom to be able to share their thoughts and demonstrate their grasp of the class material.

TS is well suited as an eportfolio system when documents need to be archived for accreditation or long term assessment profiles. It would not be suited for routine classroom assessment or daily integration into a mobile or online platform. It is also not suited for non-technology oriented students, faculty, or staff. The user needs some level of confidence when using TS

• It provides real pictures, cartoons and illstrations to creat an actual scene.
• It has different levels of lessions, good for we beginners.
• Analogies help me understand the word better!

• Students can be searched via department or program so that I can search for a specific student. I can scroll through all students and find the one I need to evaluate or I can choose the option to "show all work waiting evaluation" and it will bring up student submissions that I have waiting for me.
• TaskStream easily links or embeds into online classroom portals. We use BlackBoard now and students have an ePortfolio link that takes them directly to their menu of student instructions etc.
• TaskStream actually serves its purpose well of archiving portfolio assignments so they can be referenced for an individual reason or for accreditation or reporting. It accomplishes this important goal for educational institutions.

• the price is a little expensive. could offer better group discounts for multi users
• N/A
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• There is a steep learning curve with TaskStream as the searching and even evaluating process is not intuitive. Although it is visual like a flowchart or grid--which I think is an asset--sometimes I can lock others out of the document or I have choices of "returning to student and deleting all instances of this submission" or "returning to student later" or "returning to student now and not deleting this submission" . . . I am unsure what these different options MEAN to the programmer. What I think they mean has not always proved to be correct. As a result, it creates confusion or frustration in the process.
• The way TaskStream is used in the education department, multiple people may evaluate a capstone project in order to verify approval to progress to the next step--or next capstone activity. If a faculty or staff user inappropriately marks a document inside TaskStream, it can undo the submissions and make the process begin all over again. I have had this happen accidentally--a colleague returned a document the wrong way. The student then had to resubmit, two other colleagues had to approve indvidually, and then the 3rd party had to approve it the correct way. So although some aspects or tools/buttons in TS may not be intuitive, making errors in process can be time-consuming and create frustrations as they affect other people's work as well.
• TaskStream does not work on a mobile device very efficiently. Because it has pop up windows, I often cannot get it to cooperate on a tablet, ipad, or mobile device. This is problematic when I am travelling and need to attend to a document in TS.

Rosetta Stone is a very comprehensive program with several different components. In truth after an initial orientation by a teacher, students (adults or school children) are able to use the software and navigate through its sections.

There is no real accountability to learning since users can click the "show answers" button through the entire program--although I wouldn't recommend getting rid of the "show answers" button either because coming up with the verbatim expressions the program demands would be nearly impossible without being fed the answers.

In the past, I have tried iReady, Edmentum, and others; however, Rosetta Stone has by and far provided the best success in my classroom with helping the newcomers and beginning English language learners. Most of the other programs did not start close enough to the basics for these students to be able to build the confidence they needed to gain success with the program.

TS is the only e-portfolio system I have used for students. I have used Kenobi as a wiki for holding data that was interactive with other faculty members. I found it to be simple but lacking in ability to be robust or host dynamic data. Kenobi does not have the ability to score or complete rubrics in the same fashion--there is a place for rubrics, but it is not as dynamic as TS

• Positive: It helps me have a better communication with colleagues.
• Positive: It helps me understand our projects better.
• Positive: It will potentially add more possibilities to the promotion in the future.

• Although I am not on the administrative side of my department, it has been and continues to be the e-portfolio management system of choice for Walden University. Walden is now a for-profit school that is trading on the market. With that in mind, they would not invest in a system that was not functioning to its expectations.
• If you view TS from a faculty or user perspective, I have colleagues who are frustrated with TS and its not "intuitive" nature, and they have eventually quit working for Walden and TS and the multiple systems we have to use was cited as a reason.
• it would be ideal if there was one overall system that could manage all the different data artifacts we have to collect as faculty in higher ed. Due to accreditation and liability standards, we have to maintain faculty quality, classroom quality, student-learning quality and many other aspects of the educational system. TS is ONE of the systems we use. In the perfect world, there would be just one or two that completed the job.