Making Language Learning Accessible with Colorin Colorado

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Thanks for listening to the Tech Tools for Teachers podcast where each week we talk about a free piece of tool of technology that you can use in your classroom. I'm your host, Shanna Martin. I'm a middle school teacher, technology and instructional coach for my district.

And I'm our producer and husband, Fuzz Martin. And sometimes these intros get a bit rocky.

Oh, wow. Nice.

Thank you.

That was so clever.

I know.

So here we are, January coldness in good old Wisconsin. And we're on episode 201. We've gone past the 200 mark. It's very exc. And all the things end of semester. All of the children are now cold and antsy.

Yes.

But it's not quite February yet, so we're doing okay. We're still holding on to the holidays. So here we are. Season seven, season seven, episode 201. Episode 201 and you made a joke about Rocky.

I did, I did. Like the Rocky Mountains, folks.

Yes, like the Rocky Mountains, John Denver.

Good job. That's amazing. So the site we're talking about today is called Colorin Colorado.

And it is really, really, really helpful if you have English learners in your classroom or in your building or in your school. And there's so many cool resources. So I'm highlighting the things that I think are the most useful.

But if you just dig into this website, you are going to find so much helpful information for your students and for your families. My highlights, my top five list.

Top five.

So grade level support for teachers. So there is all kinds of support for teachers. You can pull up grade level like grade level two students.

And I've got ELs in my classroom and I need to figure out how I'm going to support them and what, what's best for their meeting their needs. And so that's really helpful and I'll kind of walk through all this in the site. 2.

There are parent resources which are so helpful and this website can be an in either English or Spanish.

So you just push a button and the whole website switches from English to Spanish, which is really helpful to help those students, families and give them resources at home. There is professional development for teachers and paras and administrators and all kinds of videos and resources. Resource library.

You can sort by audience on the site, which is really cool. So if you. There's a button that you click on the right hand side. When you click it, it will change to be like teacher resources. Click on it.

Paraprofessional resources. Click on it. Administrative resources. So there's so much information depending on what the audience is.

You can click on it and the site will sort it for you, which I think is really helpful. Yeah, especially when you're digging through all these resources.

And then the last one, there's a huge resource library of books and articles and videos and all kinds of stuff, which is super awesome and helping meet all of these kids needs so that you know what's going on and to be able to feel a part of your classroom. So on the site itself, you will see it's kind of laid out just straight across the bar, across the top.

So there's ELL Basics, school support, teaching ells for families, books and authors, videos, and then there's that audience button I was talking about. And you choose which audience you are. There's even actually a button for librarians as well. And then there's the resource library.

But I'm going to show you the ELL Basics again. There's so much information. I'm just going to highlight a couple of the cool things that are in here.

But it like for starters, new to teaching ells, ELS in your classroom. It kind of gives you a little background if it's your first year. Here's a Spanish classroom glossary that would help.

Just basic phrases and things like that to support your kids when they're learning things. There's a guide in there and click on the little guide and each button kind of takes you down to there's PDFs that you're able to kind of go through.

But if you're in the basic guide, helpful words and phrases in Spanish, common expressions like hello, how are you? Very good classroom expressions.

And then things like bathroom and pencil and pen and some of those things where if you haven't had Spanish as a class ever, kind of some background information.

But I think of also using that for labeling your classroom for students and also helping your students who are English speaking learn some of those basic phrases so that way they can communicate with their classmates both ways as well. I took two years of Spanish in high school, so I can do my colors my days of the week.

But when it comes to supporting my students as I have middle schoolers, actually it's kind of fun because I have them teach me new words as well. So that way I can learn as they're learning as well.

They have featured articles so like as you're a new teacher, you can scroll through and it'll give you like some video information and some book lists just for beginners and research and recommendations and social media. And you just keep scrolling through this list of all of these resources and you can pick and choose what would meet your needs as a teacher.

Having not having ELs in your classroom before or introducing that to your students as well. They have special populations under EL basics. They have policy and research. They have information by state. So all of that's resources.

Just like the basic information. They have it all nicely laid out for you, which is really cool.

If you look under school support, they have different options for like college readiness for ELs versus events during the school year. Like, how do you handle those things and how do you label them and what does that look like?

And back to school resources and parent teacher conferences. I mean, I just. There's so many cool things and I also appreciate them.

There's also videos in there of teachers who have experience communicating with parents and making sure that you're effectively making sure those kids are supported in your classrooms as well, which is really cool. There's just so many resources.

Yeah.

Yeah. They also have like teaching el, so then you can go through like language and vocabulary and literacy instruction and.

And alignment with common core and technology.

And we've done an episode before, I believe it was last season, where I had audio, where there was like basic conversations and audio with students that they could use as a resource library. And that also those sites could also easily be used with like this resource.

But also then the students can have audio and speaking skills that they could practice as well. And so those two sites would be helpful that we talked about something.

When you're talking, when you're teaching your ELs in your classroom and finding different ways to support them, especially older students, I think middle school, high school, where they can work independently during some time if it's built into their day.

Sure.

To help support them in the classroom, which is cool. Under the families source resources they have, from preschool through school success to raising bilingual kids to technology at home.

Again, libraries and all kinds of resources. They have books and authors that are helpful. That would be really cool to go into diverse book guides and resources. The resources are phenomenal.

Like, there's so many in this site. And then videos. So they have a whole collection of videos about authors, the experts. They even have a Facebook Live series. They have a PBS show.

Cool.

We love pbs.

We do.

And it's called Becoming bilingual. Oh. And so it goes for reading rockets and coaching young readers and how what being bilingual is like.

So there's resources for that and again, more support and questions and blogs and all of these things.

So if you have students in your classroom that are coming in that are new to your classroom or depending on their level, because our Yale kids have, you know, levels one through four and how they're like labeled and what they need support in.

This is just a huge resource that is very helpful for teachers, whether you've had students before or if you're getting new students into your classroom to just have that information, which I think would be really helpful. So check it out, Check it out. Color in Colorado and Colorado, it has all kinds of things on the site.

C O L O R I N C O L O R A D o dot so there you go. And again you can the site comes in both English and in Spanish, so whatever your needs are, that is available as well.

Excellent. They did a very great job on this website of just making the navigation super easy.

And even if you go to the ELL resources by state and we click on Wisconsin, even the news changes to Wisconsin News and such. So it's pretty cool.

So yay.

I dig it. Good, good work on the website ux.

Yes.

On top of everything else, on top of all the great content.

Yes. As well. Awesome. So check it out. Check out the resources for your teachers.

Pass them on to those that could use it for professional development with your staff.

If you're in charge of that or able to be in charge of that, there might be some helpful trainings in here that might be good for your students or sorry for your staff. So just think about it and check it out and see all the resources on Color in Colorado.

Cool. Very good.

So there you go. There's our little chat this week. Thanks for tuning in. This has been the Tech Tools for Teachers podcast.

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