Chris Spackman
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.
Slides
- Chris’s presentation slides (pdf)
Docs, Sheets, etc.
- A spreadsheet for translating to several languages at once, easily.1
- A similar spreadsheet for translating between English and a student’s L1, easily.2 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.3
Fun with Forms
- Example of a Multilingual Form (2 Languages per Question) (Google Form)
- Another example of a Multilingual Form (Ask for Language) (Google Form)
Multimedia
- How to fix English captions in (your own) YouTube videos.4
- How to turn on auto-translate for YouTube videos.
Large Language Model Assistance (LLM, aka AI
)
- 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.5 - 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.6 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!)
Lagniappe (something extra)
Below are links to some extra resources that I hope participants will find helpful.
Know Your Rights
handout for families of English Learners.7- Most recent version8 of my next book
Basics of Working with English Learners
. Will become anEvery Sentient Being’s
guide when finished. Every Sentient Being’s
Guides9 to- technology (pdf)
- password security (pdf)
- Several pages of useful keyboard shortcuts (pdf) from PD I did in 2021.
Notes
- great for displaying in class ↩
- great as a personal dictionary for a student ↩
- safest because only runs Google code
owned
by your Google account. ↩ - Automatic captions usually have small errors, and sometimes have huge errors. ↩
- The prompts you use with ChatGPT can make a big difference! ↩
- The video editing site (which I otherwise do recommend) Veed.io requires an expensive subscription to get translated subtitles! ↩
- available in English and Spanish ↩
- current version: under heavy development; will be updated often ↩
- 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. ↩
Send comments and questions to chris@chrisspackman.com.
Last updated: 2026-10-22
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