netTrekker Blog

ELL Channel Brings World Culture Experience to All Learners

Described in this article are two lesson plan ideas created by NT101 Summer Session participants, Ryan Cummings (Jennings, IN) and Rachel Erickson (Aurora, CO). Both educators used resources from netTrekker’s ELL Channel and the literary tales, The Bear Prince and Jack and the Beanstalk to design an interdisciplinary cultural exploration.

These lessons, through the use of resources from the ELL channel take students to China, France, Mexico, Spain and the United States to learn about mathematics, literature, people and the cultural traditions that surround these countries.

Rachel’s lesson is geared toward primary and elementary students. The lesson is centered around the Mexican folktale, The Bear Prince. Students explore the Sierra Madre Occidental region of Mexico through Google Earth and the eyes of Rosa, a Mexican girl who is forced to marry a mysterious bear. Using interactive websites, videos and images from netTrekker’s ELL channel students will sketch cultural items and work with a partner using Microsoft Paint to create a visual representation depicting the cultural items/traits they researched in My Portfolio folders Rachel compiled.

For secondary students, Ryan brings fun, practical application, and thorough understanding to the complex skills of calculating currency exchange and crop yields.

Students in Ryan’s class will research using netTrekker resources to decide what type of currency Jack takes from the giant depending upon a teacher-assigned geographic location of Jack’s origin. Students will research and decide during which season, in different countries Jack could have planted and grown the beans to yield the best monetary crop. Students will work in groups to design a graph of their choice and present a two-minute debate about where Jack should live to be most successful in his business.

Thanks to Ryan and Rachel for sharing these wonderful lesson ideas for all netTrekker learners. Enjoy reading reflections below from these NT101 Alumni and visit the ELL Channel to explore the amazing tools and resources in the ELL Skill Development and Multicultural Pavilion areas.

“I absolutely love using netTrekker. The different uses I can get out of netTrekker for my everyday lessons are remarkable. The ELL Channel is a feature that is going to help me enhance my students’ knowledge of world culture as I am teaching them mathematics. My students will have a more enriched learning environment because of the ELL Channel in netTrekker.

My Jack and the Beanstalk lesson is going to allow me, using features inside of the ELL Channel, to enrich my students’ understanding that the world we are apart of is much bigger than the town we live. It will allow them to research different areas of the world while sitting in their local classroom. They will be able to experience different cultures that they may not normally get to study. The more I can let my students see what similarities and differences there are in different parts of the world, the more I am going be able to prepare them for their future lives.

The ELL feature also allows them to get help with the understanding and meanings of different words and different languages. With the different options they can use in netTrekker, students will be able to learn at their own reading level and move at their own pace. The other thing I like about this feature is the read aloud button. If an article is a little too difficult for a student to read, then they can use this feature to help them get the understanding they need. What a great feature for all of our students. Each student now has the opportunity to push the limits of their own learning.

Net trekker is a tool that I am so glad our school has for me to use and the ELL Channel is just one part of it that will help me to diversify my students’ learning.”

Ryan Cummings
Secondary Teacher and Coach
Jennings, IN

“The increase in ethnic and language diversity of students in our schools requires educators to teach students to value diversity and understand cultural differences in order to be successful participants in a global society. People don’t often recognize the impact culture has on behavior until they interact with someone whose culture differs from their own. netTrekker’s Multicultural Pavilion within the English Learners’ channel gives both teachers and students a window into various cultures. The resources found provide a means to increase cross-cultural awareness, which will lead to a greater understanding of the world. I am grateful that netTrekker has included the Multicultural Pavilion as part of the English Learners channel so educators and students may benefit from the variety of resources that help us reflect on our own values, beliefs, and perceptions while gaining perspective on cultures that differ from our own.”

Rachel Erickson
Instructional Technology Coach
Aurora, CO

Tags: ELL, lesson plans, literature, math, NT101, staff development

ELL Resources: Inspired testimonials from NT101 Participants

No two children, like the beautiful butterflies that open this blog, are identical.  And like butterflies, netTrekker’s ELL Channel and differentiated instruction features help each learner to take flight. As the school year is quickly coming to close, I’m reminded that it’s IEP and 504 plan time. These very important meetings dedicate time to students with special learning needs to have their plan re-evaluated and decide what should be included for the following year.

As the netTrekker 101 online course facilitator, I just wrapped up module six on using netTrekker with English Language Learners. The course participants filled the discussion forums with very thoughtful content which may be helpful to those of you who are writing IEP and 504 plans.

I am delighted to share with you several of the participants’ comments from the discussion board about the Dictionary Hot Key, Read Aloud, Readability, and other refinement features in netTrekker.  Enjoy these testimonials from passionate educators.

“ I love these features!!  What a wonderful service for students!!  First of all, the students LOVE to use earphones—I KNOW they are not just skimming over the information because they are sitting there listening to the netTrekker article…in TOTAL!!

It’s also a great feature for one of my teachers who is legally blind.  He loved it because he could listen instead of using his super magnifiers & putting his face up to the screen.

I loved the dictionary hot button when I went to some science related websites via netTrekker.  There were words that I didn’t know & instead of moving ahead, I stopped to find out the meaning of the word.

Wonderful Service to students and teachers alike!!!”
Gina Lunsford, Woodlands Christian Academy, TX

“As a high school English teacher, I think the best feature from this week is the read aloud button. In my classroom I have so many different levels (especially reading levels). Many students struggle with reading on their own. This button makes it an even playing field.

I look forward to utilizing this to help the students grasp concepts better in my classroom.”
Carrie Brisbane, Charter Tech High School, NJ

“Even as a regular education teacher my students can benefit from the readability tab and read aloud feature. There are low-level readers in our classrooms as well and it can provide that extra support that the student may need.

I love the dictionary hot key feature because it provides not only a definition but word origin as well.  It is always fun to discuss with students where words originate from and how they came to our country.”
Kalin Wilburn, Mansfield School District, OH

“The read aloud feature allows students to explore and learn on their own even if their English reading skills are not particularly strong. Many second language learners learn spoken language much faster than written language because they are immersed in the spoken language of their second language in their new country. Read Aloud provides these learners the opportunity to strengthen their reading skills because the see the words as they listen to the reading.”
Sarah Garrett
Glacier Hills Elementary, MN

To take full advantage of the many resources to support ELL students and to customize enrichment resources for all of your students, visit the ELL Channel in netTrekker.

A few spaces are still available for the Summer 2010 session of NT101. TO REGISTER: Contact your Account Manager.  If you have questions or need additional information, please e-mail Amy Ellisor, the NT101 Course facilitator, aellisor@nettrekker.com.

Tags: ELL, ELL Channel, ESL, netTrekker, read aloud, refinement menu

Top 10 Reasons Future Teachers Love netTrekker

Shared by Education Students
Dr. Douglas Hazlett’s Integrated Instructional Systems Class
Thiel College Education Department, PA

1.  “netTrekker allows future teachers to use materials and resources that are credible and reliable – saving us valuable time planning our first units.” (Saves Time)

2.  “netTrekker is a resource for materials that are based on standards AND provide differentiated instruction.” (Standards-Aligned)

3.  “Searches for photos and videos are safe, unlike a general search engine such as Google™.” (Safe Searching)

4.  “Organized resources that can be individualized for student needs, including gifted and special needs students.” (Personalize Learning)

5.  “netTrekker pulls together all the aspects necessary for learning to take place while making instruction more engaging.” (Engaging Students)

6.  “netTrekker helps incorporate technology into the classroom while accommodating all learning styles.” (Technology Integration)

7.  “netTrekker is organized and easy to navigate which means less of a headache for teachers.” (Easy to Use)

8.  “The Read Aloud and Dictionary/Translation tools will dramatically help ELL/ESL students.” (Support for ELL/ESL Students)

9.  “Ideas and information for classroom management, professional development, learning styles and strategies, special education, and more.” (Teacher Tools)

10.  “netTrekker provides a lot of tips and resources for helping our students become 21^st century global players.” (21^st Century Learning)

“From freshman students investigating education topics through seniors doing their student teaching; Thiel’s educaiton students made great use of netTrekker.  Thiel College requires all education majors to develop standards-based lesson plans using engaging pedagogy (like Marzano’s instructional strategies) in fun creative ways using a variety of instructional strategies for all learners.  netTrekker is a tremendous digital assistant in this process. netTrekker provides all the answers for college students to design standards-based lessons using engaging pedagogies to increase student achievement for all learners.  Special features like timeline are very popular with students especially history majors.  Science majors love all of the interactive websites that are suggested with a keyword search.  All students use the image search feature.  netTrekker is just a tremendous resource for college education majors and K-12 teachers alike.”

Douglas R. Hazlett, Ph.D.
Chair and Associate Professor
Education Department
Thiel College

Tags: 21st Century Learning, ELL, ESL, integration, netTrekker, professional development, read aloud, resources, Teacher Tools

MasAlto: Escritores/Writers

Engage your ELL/ESL group by finding sites in their language quickly!  Use any keyword in any grade level, then personalize those search results to your non-English speaking population by applying the Language Refinement Menu.  Many times there are multiple language choices you can make, depending on the keyword and availability of those topics in different languages.

For example, keyword search “writers” and refine by Spanish to locate this user-friendly Site of the Day written in Spanish and geared toward younger internet users. The site features information about many famous authors from throughout the world. For each writer, students will find a picture and short biography.

Click here to login to netTrekker and access the Site of the Day.

Login to netTrekker before midnight (eastern) today to access the netTrekker Site of the Day and add it to your “My Portfolio” for easy future reference.  After midnight, the new Site of the Day will go up and you’ll have to look for today’s site using netTrekker’s search tool. Need help with My Portfolio? Easy, handy instructions can be found here.

Not yet a netTrekker subscriber? Visit www.nettrekker.com and click on the Free Trial link at the top right of the page for 14 days of complimentary access to netTrekker.

Tags: ELL, ESL, site of the day, spanish, writers

ESL Gold: Speaking English

If you were learning a foreign language, you would want to have a resource that gives you many choices and different approaches to acquiring that language, right? Today’s Site of the Day, ESL Gold, does just that for those who are learning English. Maintained by ESL instructors, this is a real gold mine for anyone learning or teaching English conversation.

The user’s ability to choose his or her level as low beginning, high beginning, low intermediate, high intermediate, or advanced, is a fantastic way to target your ESL learners at the level they are currently learning and help them advance.  Other helpful features include a word of the day, phrases for conversation with audio links that model the sentences, conversation topics, textbook recommendations, speaking activities, learning strategies, and quizzes. This is an awesome resource for a growing ESL population and educators that serve that population!

Click here to login to netTrekker and access the Site of the Day.

Login to netTrekker before midnight (eastern) today to access the netTrekker Site of the Day and add it to your “My Portfolio” for easy future reference.  After midnight, the new Site of the Day will go up and you’ll have to look for today’s site using netTrekker’s search tool. Need help with My Portfolio? Easy, handy instructions can be found here.

Not yet a netTrekker subscriber? Visit www.nettrekker.com and click on the Free Trial link at the top right of the page for 14 days of complimentary access to netTrekker.

Tags: ELL, ESL, site of the day

Kissing Frogs brings Literature and Culture to the Classroom

The Princess and the Frog will debut in theaters this December.  Disney brings to us, “a modern twist on a classic tale.”  Set in the bayous of Louisiana, this film follows the adventures of a frog prince and a beautiful girl.

As this movie is filled with Cajun culture and a definite contrast to classic literature, it provides the perfect introduction to a multicultural unit of study centered around familiar classic folk or fairy tales, as well as, any other topics related to holidays or cultural events.

netTrekker’s Multicultural Pavilion and other portions of the ELL channel contain a wealth of resources to help students study classic literature and the cultural  traditions represented in diverse school populations.

Choose a familiar classic folk or fairy tale or any other topic relating to culture.  In the Elementary tab of netTrekker, do a keyword search for Venn Diagrams.  Use the subject refinement and choose Language Arts>Literature.  On this page you will find a great place to begin planning,  Scholastic: Myths, Folktales, and Fairy Tales: Online Activity Teacher’s Guide. Scholastic’s Online Activities are designed to support the teaching of standards-based skills. While participating in the Myths, Folktales, and Fairy Tales project, students become proficient with the skills listed below, only to mention a few.

* Appreciate diverse cultures and traditions through folklore and folktales.
* Compare historic world cultures with contemporary ones.
* Demonstrate understanding of the genres by responding to questions.

Select a story based on your content standards and the cultural diversity of your student population. For example, you many choose to study the Persian version of Cinderella. You will find that this Cinderella may prefer a sturdy sandal to a glass slipper so that she may trek through the sandy Persian terrain. If you are a physical education teacher, you may choose to focus on the sports of a particular culture. Math teachers may be interested in converting currency or analyzing climate statistics.

Use the resources in the Multicultural Pavilion and/or any other portion of the ELL channel in netTrekker to locate resources to help students study the food, geographic features, weather and climate, dress, or any other topics pertinent to your curriculum.

For the assessment of this project, create a plan for students to produce a visual representation of what they’ve learned.  Encourage students to cook authentic dishes, create cultural costumes and enjoy  associated art and music to produce a shared Cultural Literacy Festival.

To learn more about the Multicultural Pavilion and other resources to support your ELL student population, contact your Account Manager. We’d love to provide the perfect Professional Development solution for you.

Tags: ELL, language arts, multiculture, profess, professional development, standards, Training

A Look at English Language Learners Channel (Part II of III)

(This is a continuation of a previous blog post on netTrekker’s English Language Learners Channel and the resources it offers for ELL teachers and students. The previous entry focused on ELL skill development. To read Part I of this blog series on nT’s ELL Channel, click here.)

Multicultural Pavilion

• Sites on geographic and cultural information on continents, countries, and regions;

• Resources on ethnic identity, acculturation, cultural sensitivities, diversity, cultural heritage, and social justice issues.

One goal of the resources in nT’s Multicultural Pavilion is to go beyond restating facts and offering data. Students benefit from understanding not only the unique languages, religions, and traditions unique to each culture but also the common threads that tie together the entire human race. The United Nations’ Cyberschoolbus (http://cyberschoolbus.un.org/), which offers versions of its site in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish, opens students’ eyes to important global issues, such as poverty, peace, discrimination, and hunger, and promotes understanding and response to these topics via interactive games and quizzes, webcasts, news stories, and teacher materials. nT links to 100 resources from this site.

A hot topic today in America is immigration, and the Multicultural Pavilion offers several resources on this topic, one such being PBS’ In the Mix, which shares the stories of five teen immigrants.  In the Mix is the online companion to a PBS program of the same name and offers a collection of immigration-related links, “myths and facts”, and clips from the show. Another great PBS link is the Immigration Myths & Realities Quiz, also in our immigration resources. And yet another site worth checking out is the Library of Congress’ Immigration feature, complete with vocabulary activities, recipes, and interviews.

For our next and final blog in the ELL channel, we’ll look at ELL Feature Enhancements, such as the Dictionary Hot Key, and ELL Reference Tools, which will boost the ELL Learner’s educational experiences, both in the classroom and on the web.

Tags: ELL, ELL Resources, English Language Learners, Multicultural Resources

A Look at English Language Learners Channel (Part I of III)

Are you a teacher of English language learners, looking for resources to facilitate classroom instruction as well as for tools to enhance students’ own learning experiences? Look no further than the English Language Learners (ELL) channel, with resources available for English learners of all grade levels. Clicking on the “English Learners” link will open two pathways: “Skill Development” and “Multicultural Pavilion” resources.

Depending on whether you are in Elementary, Middle, or High School, these pathways will present you with a different list of nodes and associated resources. However, the gist of these pathways, no matter what level, is pretty much the same. netTrekker’s Help section covering the ELL channel offers a detailed description of the channel’s offerings, but here are some highlights of the first pathway, ELL Skill Development, provided below:

ELL Skill Development

• Sites on reading and writing, listening, and speaking skills,
• Sites on critical thinking and fluency;
• Access to a broad collection of resources on ELL teaching methodologies;
• Access to assessment, research, and proficiency standards;
• Resources for parents of ELL students.

Included in the collection of ELL Skill Development resources are online quizzes and activities from The Internet TESL Journal (http://iteslj.org/) and Activities for ESL Students (http://a4esl.org/). nT has cataloged nearly 70 links from these sites, covering topics such as subject-verb agreement, irregular verbs, parts of speech,  sentence completion, and vocabulary.

To augment students’ English-language growth, resources geared toward helping ELL students understanding of important math and science vocabulary words and concepts are a must. An example of one such resource is Harcourt’s Math Glossary, which makes new math terms easy-to-understand with colorful animations, audio clips, charts, and diagrams.

nT also offers links to bilingual dictionaries, resources for natives speakers of Chinese and Spanish, print resources, tutorials, and other sites references appropriate for learners of English. Be sure to check out http://www.diccionarios.com/ and http://www.tomisimo.org/, great for native speakers of Spanish, and Look Way Up (http://lookwayup.com/free/dictionary.htm) a dictionary offering multilingual translation to and from English.

Next time, we’ll continue our look at netTrekker’s ELL offerings, specifically the next pathway, the Multicultural Pavilion and its resources.

Tags: ELL, ELL Skill Development, English Language Learners, ESL