The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
Education:How To
Welcome to the Thursday edition of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies. Whether you’re new to the show or a long-time listener, I’m so glad you’re here for today’s edition of “Highly Recommended.” This week, I want to make sure you know just how amazing the Google Translate App really is.
Living here in Bratislava, and traveling around Europe with our family, we are constantly confronted by languages we don’t know. On Street Signs, parking signs, parking tickets, frozen pizza cooking instructions, directions for using new toys on Christmas morning, mail that lands in our box, and so much more. Which is why we really couldn’t do without our Google translate app.
At first we stared at the strange text and painstakingly tried to type it into the app. But then we discovered the camera feature. Did you know you can pick any two languages in the app, then take a picture of the first and instantly see it translated to the second?
You can also speak into the app in one language and see your words typed out in another. Or hold the camera up to someone you want to understand and get their words translated.
It’s an incredible tool, and one I use constantly in my everyday life.
For your emerging bilingual or trilingual students, Google Translate can be a huge lifeline. They can quickly hold their app camera over handout instructions, printed writing prompts, or classroom posters and see it in their own language. They can take a picture or screenshot and have the translation available for the rest of the class. And of course, beyond the app, they can plug large sections of text into Google Translate online to help them better understand a podcast transcript, close reading passage, or news article.
Google Translate can help your students keep up with your content and express the complexity of their ideas as their second or third language skills catch up with their thought processes. That’s why this week, I highly recommend you add it to your phone and get familiar with it. It doesn’t take long, and it could make all the difference to some of your students (and perhaps their parents come conference time, too).
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296: My Favorite Final Exam (I mean, not that I don’t love Multiple Choice)
295: Do your Students Race through Superficial Revision? Try This.
294: Crying in the Dusty Stairwell (on Hitting a Wall in Teaching)
293: Creative Exam Review Activities for ELA (that don't involve a packet)
292: Try the Sesame Street Quiz (5 Different Ways)
291: When Genius Hour WORKS (The Elective Series)
290: Try this Hack to Teach Varied Sentence Structure
289: How to Launch Book Talk Podcasts in Class
288: A Lesser-Known Amanda Gorman Gem
277: How Erica Used the AI PBL Project to give her Students Voice
276: Let All Books Count: A Tale of Two Kids
275: Teaching SciFi & Fantasy (The Elective Series continues)
274: Using Students’ Love of Youtube to our ELA Advantage
273: First Chapter Friday: Nancy Tandon Reads
272: You Need to Know about this Short Story
271: #Bookface is Well Worth a Look
270: Try a March Madness Poetry Bracket
269: Teaching Research to Digital Natives
267: So your Students aren't Doing the Reading? Here's Help.
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