I’ve been pulling together a series of posts regarding Explain Everything as a format for creating templates. In that series I’ve attempted to expand on some methods to create templates, and established a space to share those templates with others. You can read those posts here:
Let’s take that workflow, and apply it to an urgent need within our school system. We currently have a growing population of Syrian students attending our schools; many of whom do not speak English, and require assistance in learning the English language.
With that need has emerged requests for a number of different “apps” that may help to support this learning. Finding apps that will assist Arabic speakers to learn English, that don’t contain advertisements, and that are aimed at older students, rather than toddlers learning English as their first language, is a difficult task. It can also be costly.
This offers an opportunity for our students to help these new Canadians by creating “apps” to assist them in transitioning into our schools. For example, some of the apps being requested involve topics like the first 100 words an English language learner might be required to know. What if our students were to contextualize this need, with an EE template that contained pictures from around their school of common objects (hallway, door, washroom, pencil), with audio or video of the item name being pronounced. In schools where bilingual (Arabic/English) students exist, those items could be named in both languages.
Because these files can be created, uploaded, downloaded by others, augmented, and then uploaded again, we have an opportunity to crowd-source this work, building upon each others’ creations across classrooms, or around the board.
Literacy apps: that teach the letters of the alphabet, sight words, basic English phrases; numeracy apps: that cover the names of numbers, and basic numeracy vocabulary — these are all within the scope of what we could create using Explain Everything as a platform.
Can our students develop resources to help our Syrian newcomers? I think we can contextualize resources to help create specific supports, that can help welcome these students into our schools. I think we can do a better job than the apps I’ve currently been able to locate within the iOS app store. I’m hoping you agree, and that you and your students will take some time to help create resources that might be of service to fellow students, new to this country, attempting to make a new life here in Hamilton.