Saturday, February 2, 2019

Thing 21: Supporting ELLs

After hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, our district opened a school for the many students who arrived in Rochester because they had lost their homes. We began to get many questions from their teachers about what apps and tools are available to help the many ELL students. A lot of teachers were asking to have their students use programs like Lexia or RAZ Kids. Teachers were desperate for something that could help students develop their English quickly. I explored thing 21 to see beyond Lexia and RAZ kids as digital supports for ELLs.
I read the blogs, "12 Ways to Support English Learners in the Mainstream Classroom" and "How to use Technology to Support ELLs in your Classroom." The first suggestion in the Common Sense education blog was not lost on me - Look for ELL friendly supports in the tools you are already using. It is such a simple suggestion that left me thinking, "Duh!" while also asking myself how often have I done this in the apps and the Google Suite with my ENL teachers in mind? I have explored Google Translate and voice thread before when working with ELL students. My first time with Google translate was with a student who only knew Arabic. I was able to give information to her, but having her respond became an immediate problem because the keyboard did not have the Arabic letters for her to create responses to the questions and information that weren't covered by nodding or shaking her head. I love that Google Slides has the captions feature. This is new to me and I think it can be useful for older students, especially in a blended model of teaching where the students are working online as well as face to face. This tool is really amazing. I had a lot of fun trying it out. I like how it supports the connection between hearing the language and seeing the words. It was very accurate in the slides I tried. One thing I wonder is how it does with really technical subjects like chemistry where the language is extremely specialized. As a side note - captions would also be an incredible tool for students with hearing loss so they don't miss spoken information during presentations.
In "12 Ways to Support English Learners in the Mainstream Classroom" the immediate thoughts I had are that Google makes it quite simple to make it visual - you can add images and videos as you are working. This increases the power of differentiation in Google Classroom because you can add the images and videos to documents and assignments right there for your ELL students. It does become a question of time of course, but the technology saves hours of looking in and for books that present the information you need to teach. I discussed this with one of the classroom teachers I support. She has been trying to find ways to support her ELL students while using Google Classroom. After I read and explored I had an interesting conversation with an ENL teacher about the tools I learned in Thing 21. She said that she was glad I was learning more about these tools and that she struggles sometimes to when advocating for her students in their classes. It got me thinking that maybe our department should consider developing an online PD aimed at digital tools for classroom teachers to support ELL students. I plan to bring this up to my colleagues. We try to infuse ideas throughout our PDs, but it might be good for us to have a specific PD on supporting ELLs. I plan to propose the creation of a digital tools to support ELLs PD in our department. I'll let you know what happens!

1 comment:

  1. This might be helpful for languages with very different letters, google has some virtual keyboards that you can turn on and then use your mouse to select the letters: https://www.google.com/inputtools/services/features/virtual-keyboard.html

    And love you plan to do some PD for your colleagues, such an important topic.

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