So I have been working on a grant recently with a local college, and my specific grant was to work on background knowledge
for ELLs.
Do you have this situation too? I have so many students who don't have enough language to wrap their heads
around the text they are able to decode. And sometimes--as in the case of one third-grader last year--it's just a matter
of letting the student get a glimpse of video showing context.
I had one student who decoded a pretty tough
text on the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens almost flawlessly. But as soon as I started asking questions, we ran into all sorts of shoulder shrugs.
I used this
scenario to win a grant to get United Streaming into our school. You can sign up for a 30-day trial period to see if it's right for you. Really cool stuff, but also,
very expensive. And my grant was to not only help change teacher training at the college but to get teachers at my school
to use it.
Talk about herding cats! Most teachers from the baby boom generation, not that my fellow gen-Xers are much
better, would rather that the librarian do all that "tech stuff" for them.
But here's the upshot:
There are some really great resources out there if you just have the ingenuity to find a way to use them. YouTube is a great place to start.
So you don't have access to YouTube at school? Yeah, I don't either. It would
be nice if the IT guys would be able to differentiate teacher/student logons, but it hasn't happened yet. So you can use
CatchYouTube or Media Converter--and I'm sure there are others out there--to grab those videos and put them on a flash drive so you can use them later.
Another
really cool thing I've found is pocket projectors. They run in the $300-$500 range, but they look so cool! And you would
need speakers, but they would make it oh so much easier to carry technology into technology-lacking classrooms. Here's
what I found on Amazon...
My next hurdle: How to get ELLs to understand science models. I can't believe testmakers are looking for such
metaphorical thought! Any suggestions?
