Are there any resources within the Code.org community for ELL students in CSD? I have been looking but haven’t found anything.
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Hi @buyskej - What kind of resources are you looking for? We are always interested in finding out what kinda of resources would be helpful in the future.
Best,
Dani
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Dani,
I was thinking of anything that pared down the written directions into those that may be easier to understand in English. Or possibly, directions for the units in Spanish that could be shared with those ELL students (if it’s for a Spanish-speaking student, I guess. I know there are many other ELL students in our schools). The specific student I have speaks well, but she struggles with reading English as well as writing in English. I think that may be pretty common with ELL students. I hope that was what you were looking for. Thank you for the response!
Joey Buyske
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Hi Joey!
Is there a specific language that you are looking to include or do you want more generic ELL tools? Just curious. 
@buyskej - Thanks for sharing about your classroom. We will definitely keep this in mind as we think about new features.
One thing that exists right now that might be helpful is a student can understand spoken English alright but not written is the play button available on programming levels which reads the instructions to a student. The button is in the upper right corner of those levels and looks like the picture below.
-Dani
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I have one class this semester that is 90% ESL. Most of these students are newcomers to the United States and to school in general. Instead of using CS Discoveries with these 6-8th graders, I am using the CS Fundamentals for ELL. It is working really well for them. Logging on to the computer is still hard 
but the activities are ones that are designed for students with little to no literacy. Since it is a CS Fundamentals class, I have turned on the ability to use the Extended activities for my few Engilsh speaking students in that class.
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Thank you for the response and the idea. Unfortunately, my class is almost the complete opposite. I have one student who speaks English well and can understand it well enough but reading and writing English are difficult for her. Right now I have her partnered with a student who can help her if I am unavailable and that seems to be working for the moment.
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Joey,
If you have a close relationship with the parent, maybe they could also help Code.org translate their curriculum. Teaching in the NYC area there are a lot of needs and a few of our teachers are starting to reach out to the parent community to assist.
Here is a link to translate curriculum (although it might still all be for K-5 right now).
Brad
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Thank you, Brad. That is definitely something I will keep in mind moving forward.
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This is an excellent idea!! Didn’t even know that was there!
I need help with Chinese and Russian ELLs. I’m sure it’s probably wishful thinking for any resources for those languages.
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@boommen Who was it in our cohort in Pheonix that was a Russian teacher? He might be able to help with this a bit.
As you guys go through the lessons, it would be great to hear more about aspects that were particularly challenging for your ELL students. For example, @buyskej, if there are particular instructions that you thought needed paring down, we can take a look at those.
Also, I really like the idea of pairing students up for support. When I was in the classroom, a little over half my students were ELL, and it was always a balance between allowing them to work with people in their native language, to ease up on the friction as they tried to learn collaboratively, and having them work in cross-language groups, to support English acquisition. (@tvalentine the majority of my ELL students were Mandarin speakers, though I did have a couple of Russian and a few other languages represented, too (Korean, Spanish, etc.).
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Totally drawing a blank…sorry!
One of the things I decided to do for my ELL student was have her install the Google Translate extension in the Chrome browser. Then, if she is having any trouble reading the text in English she can translate the page into Spanish. In WebLab it will translate the instructions and tips but not the actual code, which makes sense. This seems like it will be a great tool for her to use. There are a ton of languages in Google Translate as well so this could be a workaround for any obstacles our ELL kids run into with their language barriers.
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Thank you for sharing this resource idea for help ELL students. If you have other ideas, it would be great if you share them.
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well im a teacher and im excited to teach you guys
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This is an excellent tip! Thank you.
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