Differentiate by interest

One unit I am teaching is tolerance. There are several readings and videos I want my students to see, but so little time. I give the students a short overview of each of the readings on a file folder. Each student is given two post-its on which to write their name. The file folders are passed around and they put their post-it on their top two choices. This encourages students to choose a topic of interest. I find this helps with ownership of the concepts as well as enthusiasm for their issue, because students had choice in their work.

Using Google Translate for ELLs

To make things a little simpler for my ELL students, I have been using Google Translate (www.google.com/translate). You can click on the title of this blog entry to get an idea of what this blog would look like translated in Spanish. My ELLs have been noticeably happy since I started adding this into my class, and I've made great use of the two classroom computers sitting in the back of my room.

In a perfect world, we can create an agenda for our classroom using MS word (just save as HTML), publish that to a simple blog, and then use Google translate to allow the ELL students to see what's happening that day. The goal would be to get the students independent, so that they know where to reach their own content. Have fun on Google translate!