Contributed by Tori Mazur
For about a decade, SMART boards have been installed in classrooms and initially a burst of excitement about interacting with that large screen in front of the room. The promise has fallen short, however, as most never purchased anything beyond the 1 person touch board, thereby creating a stand-and-deliver model that engaged at most one student at a time while the rest of the class watches.
As more schools invest in student devices, whether it be a 3:1, 2:1 or 1:1 ratio, we can ensure that all students are engaged in the content with some thoughtful technology products. The power of including students new to our country, let alone school, was obvious recently during our annual Technology Responsible Use lesson. Every student participates in these lessons before agreeing to use school technology for learning, even if they are newcomers, so it is essential that we provide equitable access.
Our elementary school subscribes to PearDeck, which integrates with our Google Education Suite, but also works with Microsoft. While the free version allows for the same interactivity, the types of questions your slides can be converted into is upgraded when using the Premium features. Our lesson slides can merely present content or require students to respond, depending on how you construct your slides. When presenting this lesson to a classroom of fourth graders that included a new student from China, we took advantage of two pieces of technology to make sure he was included:
- Google Slides presented through the PearDeck add-on
- Google Translate on a small iPad that we have set aside for our ESL teachers to distribute to newcomers
Here are two slides of his responses.
The student held up Google Translate to the text on screen and it translated into Chinese immediately so he could access the question. He answered in English without the need for additional scaffold. This gave us some formative data that he knows some English and can demonstrate his knowledge at his assessed level of English proficiency appropriately.
While native speakers responded to this question, his teacher and I walked over to his desk and spoke the question in English into Google Translate on the iPad. Then the student tapped the camera to capture the text for translation so he knew what his answer choices were. Being able to speak and translate in the moment is so powerful. The ability to answer on his own laptop lowered his affective filter in front of this peers, while ensuring he was a part of the learning community.
As schools and districts invest in technologies, educators working with language learners must advocate for equitable use of technology funds in order to support learners. It’s up to us to model the inclusivity that edtech products provide to support our arguments for what we need. If I had the class sitting in front of the SMART board just watching one student at a time come up to choose an answer, our new student would not have shown us how SMART he already is.
Note: There are several “freemium” products like PearDeck, including Nearpod. Some may need to be added by your district’s digital learning department. Check with your local IT department for policies that comply with any edtech product you want to use with students under 13 to protect student information and privacy, as well as adhere to federal law under COPPA.
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