We're always working to further improve our users' experience on the Linguatorium apps, because we want to make sure that your students' learning is as easy as possible.

So, I'll cut to the chase – we've got more feature updates!

Title pretty much says it all. Instead of having to mess around with opening your email inbox and entering the one-time code to access your Linguatorium dashboard, you can now login through Google with a single click! (This also works for school email addresses if they are provided by G Suite for Education.)

In the past, Linguatorium users had one of three roles: (1) Learner, (2) Instructor, or (3) Admin. In this system, instructors had to contact an admin to enroll their students in groups, so many institutions opted to just give their instructors the "Admin" role.

We've now clarified these distinctions by adding a "Group Admin" role that includes all the normal "Instructor" privileges along with the ability to manage enrollment in their own courses. Here's a quick summary table to reference. Neat!

Under the hood of our tools, there's a lot of Natural Language Processing (NLP) going on. Since human language is often "messy" and ambiguous, we process that language to provide your students with top-notch tools that can help teach them a second language.

For example, our vocabulary tool (Linguatorium Lexis) takes example sentences that other teachers have used in their classrooms and intelligently annotates them to highlight the target word. This task might be easy for a human, but it can be tough for the computer!

So, we've recently added the following improvements:

• Use lemmatization to help identify words with the same base form (see how exhibit, exhibits, and exhibited are all highlighted below?)
• Consider part-of-speech when selecting examples (you don't want an example about farm tools to learn the verb combine, right?)
• Target words are highlighted automatically now! (Don't worry, you can change it if you like.)

* Note: Like I said above, NLP is tough for the computer, so it doesn't always get it perfect. But as you can see, it's doing pretty well!

We hope that these updates will help you and your students in the classroom (whether in person or online) this fall.

Stay safe, and stay healthy.