On the Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone is premier software designed to teach foreign languages. It is used in schools, but often by business personnel as well who want to learn a foreign language.

It has great graphics and wonderful step-by-step lessons. Unfortunately, the program is HUGELY expensive. I have entered into discussions with Rosetta Stone on a couple of occasions and both times their quotes were through the roof.

They do assert that you are getting value for money. But their product for a single lab in my school has been quoted back to me at twice the amount of my departmental annual budget. And that would be a licence for only a single year....I'd have to rebuy the online support again next year, and so on.

Within the school, the program has minor challenges. You do need a lab where all the CD-ROM's work. You need headsets with microphones that work. This means that a teacher has to keep the microphones and hetsets in a box and remove them after the lesson. If these fragile items are kept in a lab, they will be mangled and destroyed. As for the CD-ROM's, this is a challenge. Students abuse them and they do not work. So in any given computer lab at any time, 3 or 4 of the computers may not have workable CD ROM's.

This, by the way, is a perfect reason to support on-line resources and supports. They do depend on an internet connection, but they are not dependent on the disk drives, headsets, USB outlets on a computer which can be damaged. If a student does find good information and needs to save it, they can always email it home.

The bottom line of this post is that Rosetta Stone is an excellent language software product, but it is, for the present, much too expensive to use and unless we can secure sources of private funding our students will never get to use the program in the class.

If someone from Rosetta reads this post, I seriously urge you to consider reducing your prices for classroom settings. I can assure you that if your product is too expensive for our high school, it is too expensive for many high schools too.

Cheers,
Dan