My ELLs, or English Language Learner students, are laughter-inducing, young pre-teens juggling the terrors of adolescence in a big school with communication barriers. While some are brand new immigrants, many are also U.S.-born students who come from limited English homes or have learning disabilities that interfere with their academic progress.
Mastering social and academic English does not come easily to my students facing challenging teenage years and an obstacle course riddled with cross-cultural misunderstandings.
Nor is the task simple for their limited English proficient parents who rely on the school to help their children where they cannot due to long work hours or gaps in understanding of local school systems.
My Project
My classroom instruction currently outpaces the capabilities of any school provided classroom laptops, technology that's in short supply to begin with. When creating lessons with my personal home laptop, I often capture screenshots of key info or close reading passages, customize handouts using a photo editor, and modify supplemental resources and letters home to families into multiple languages by switching keyboards. These are all tasks that simply take more time and more steps using older, problem-prone PCs in our building, and even my own personal home laptop is reaching its expiration date. My iPhone/iPad savvy students also live and breathe Apple products, and they teach me new tricks that help them decode text or look up research information. Yet, they're often so used to typing with their thumbs, they're less adept with managing assignments that require a true computer. With a light portable laptop like a MacBook Air that can sync with our classroom iPad, I'm able to demonstrate for my students how to complete homework tasks more effectively across many devices.
My students are ready for the 21st century, so the computer used to help generate and deliver their lessons should be too.
With the right classroom technology, less time is lost waiting on outdated software or fiddling with deteriorating hardware, and more time is gained for computers to serve as wide open doorways to extended learning they can be.
More than half of students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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