Tech and International Students

PD today on the topic of working with a growing population of international students.

Would love to get some ideas here in relation to how you all are using tech to engage and empower these students. In my own classes, some of the things we do include letting international students use browsers in their primary language, encouraging them to use Google Translate to read the Web in their primary language (easiest to run through Chrome), and using primary and target languages on Google Maps. We also use all of the different language versions of Wikipedia, regularly translate and read news media in different languages, and use search engines from the 'country of origin'.

Another thing that I've found really enlightening is allowing international students to turn in work in their primary language. It's easy enough to use Translate to, well, translate. So let students turn in essays written in German, Korean, Urdu, or whathaveyou; of course the translation is not perfect, but it sure gives you a better idea of what's going on in a student's head than trying to make guesses based on the trouble they have writing in a target language.

This doesn't mean that English-language instruction in a US school isn't important -- of course it is for all sorts of practical reasons; all I'm saying is that we don't have to let language skills always get in the way of a student's ability to express understanding.

Getting past that language issue allows students to demonstrate their understanding of and engagement with content and concepts. And in most classes -- particularly in high school -- that's what we're going for. Furthermore, sharing primary language documents between students can help break down a lot of preconceptions students may have of one another based on language differences.

Would love to hear more ideas from all of you.