3/05/2011

ESOL and Multilingual Sites Mingle with Content Areas

My College of Ed. classes are exploring ways of making language comprehensible to English language learners and bilingual learners in the content areas.  They have looked at many ways of embedding meaningful language opportunities and of reducing the linguistic load in all of the content areas.  Using technology and sites such as the following are a few of the ways to do this.
language books by joomlatools, on Flickr
Multilingual Sites
Larry Ferlazzo has some suggestions on his list of The Best Multilingual and Bilingual Sites for Math, Social Studies, and Science.  The Multilingual Science Glossaries by Glenco for middle school and high school look promising.

Little Kiddos
For young learners and beginners, Kindersay is a site worth exploring.  Thanks to Richard Byrne of Free Technology for Teachers and his post which highlights additional sites for language learners.
  
 Digital Storytelling all ages
With a bit of creativity and careful planning, digital storytelling has amazing potential in integrating language and the content areas.  Proof resides in some of the ideas and lesson plans my students have created.  Little Birds Tales seems to be young learner friendly.  I recently signed up for an educator’s account at GoAnimate and am exploring it.  I have watched my own kiddo extend her classroom language learning in some exciting ways at home on this site. (A thank you to her teacher!)  

Quiki Online Talking Encyclopedia
I have been following Quiki since it was in beta and am not sure how to categorize it.  It’s interesting to say the least.  Take a look.  What do you think in terms of language development and content integration?  Here’s a link to Quiki on a topic of interest to me.

Vocabulary
I am teaching an adult ESOL vocabulary class for beginner to advanced levels.  Here are some vocabulary sites that I recommend to them on our class glogster. (More to come soon about glogs.)

Other sites we are exploring are found on our ed sites tab, which we continually add to.  I laughed at my memory the other day when I thanked one of my students for giving me a site I recommended on this blog.  This is a conscientious attempt to highlight and apply these sites in posts like this one and Kacey’s Storyline Online post.
 
If you have any recommendations for additional sites or want to share ways they are working in your class, leave a comment or drop us an email.  Happy exploring!

top photo by  Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic Licensejoomlatools

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