Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Tech Tools for ELLs - Part 2: Annotate and Translate and Highlight, Oh My!



Tech Tools for ELLs:
A Three Part Series

Part 2: Annotate and Translate and Highlight, Oh My!

If you don’t know what an extension is, please check out Will’s Extension blog post from last month.  For ELLs, extensions (and apps) can really help them access and work through difficult information.  The Read&Write extension reads aloud any test on a website, translates text on a website, and allows students to practice reading aloud (more on that in Part 3 of this series!).  Teachers get a free premium version, which includes highlighting capabilities and a picture dictionary.

Example 1: Read&Write "read aloud" feature

Example 2: Read&Write translate feature


Marking up a text allows all learners to pull out the important information, and return to review it easily.  The Scrible Toolbar extension allows students to do just that.  Students can highlight with 4 different colors, add sticky note annotations, AND share their work with other people, meaning multiple students can mark up one website!  The extension saves all their annotations, so when they return to that website, it will automatically show the highlights and sticky notes they created.

Example 3: Scrible highlight and sticky note feature


If you’re looking for a tool that highlights pdfs that were scanned in, try out the Kami app or the DocHub app.  These both provide annotation tools such as drawing, highlighting, and adding text.  And both can be used directly from Google Drive.  This means that students can open the original pdf from their Google Drive, annotate it, and then download the annotated version into back their Google Drive.

One final tool to help ELLs access online text is the Mercury Reader extension.  This extension will “clean up” websites by removing distracting ads to create a clean, simple text.  Watch the gif below to see how it works!

Example 4: Mercury Reader cleans up a website


*Stay tuned for Part 3, which will cover resources for speaking skills!



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