Working with Newcomer English Learners

Presented via Google Meet, 2023 October 4

Resources from the session

The resources from our PD session, plus a few extras are available here. Some of these were also mentioned during my PD Resources for Technology to Support English Learners and Multilingual Families at the G-Tech conference in August of 2023.

A spreadsheet for translating to several languages at once, easily. great for displaying in class
A similar spreadsheet for translating between English and a student's L1, easily. great as a personal dictionary for a student Includes tabs for each content area class and tabs for English to L1 and L1 to English.
Presentation slides with a translation script / addon installed. Scary, but actually the safest. safest because only runs Google code owned by your Google account.

How to fix English captions in (your own) YouTube videos. Automatic captions usually have small errors, and sometimes have huge errors.
How to turn on auto-translate for YouTube videos.

ChatGPT — probably the most famous of the new AI assistants. ChatGPT can do almost anything teachers need to do with text. It is probably the engine behind every one of the recent AI sites that help teachers. The prompts you use with ChatGPT can make a big difference!
FreeSubtitles.ai creates subtitle files for videos you upload. Free service has some reasonable limits, but is quite usable. You can even get translated subtitles with the free version. The video editing site (which I otherwise do recommend) Veed.io requires an expensive subscription to get translated subtitles! The possible drawback is that you have to deal with the subtitles yourself. The site just creates them. If you want to add them to a video, I suggest Handbrake (or just email me!)

Below are links to some extra resources that I hope participants will find helpful.

Know Your Rights handout for families of English Learners. available in English and Spanish
Most recent version current version: under heavy development; will be updated often of my next book Basics of Working with English Learners. Will become an Every Sentient Being's guide when finished.
Every Sentient Being's Guides to guides: these are books I wrote for people who want a better understanding of technology and computer safety. The technology one is for educators, but non-educators can also learn from it.