HAPPY SUMMER!
May 31, 2014
Summer is almost here for us and our Stateside readers! Hopefully, no matter what hemisphere you reside in, you are nearing a loooooong and well deserved vacay! As the school year winds down for us here at Bilingual Learner, we find ourselves with some extra time to explore the latest tech tools for ESL teachers and counselors. We like to use this time to play with all the newest and coolest teaching and counseling technologies in order to get them lined up for our next school year. Below are some of the ones we like best. As always, we’ve included a lot of links as helpful resources on these topics- click on the blue links and we’ll take you right to an article, video, or product you can use!
TECH IN THE ESL WORLD
The site pbslearningmedia.org is a wonderful resource with tons and tons of video clips, both long and short, that you can use in your ESL lessons. In our latest ESL lessons guide, ESL for Beginners Volume 3, we have an entire activity based on using the PBS video clips!
Edutopia has a great series here that introduces the educator to the world of technology in education.
Google Hangouts for Teachers is a supercool tool that let’s you video conference with other teachers. Google Drive, which we adore here at BL (more on this below), has a whole slew of GD add ons that look amazing for teachers. We haven’t gotten to try them out just yet, but if they are anything like GD itself, we know they will be phenom! Definitely on our TO DO list for the summer….
Finally, here’s an amazing Pinterest board from our friends over at KidWorldCitizen.org with TONS of great techie teaching tools just perfect for your ESL lessons! Our personal fav is making word clouds with Tagzedo— talk about an amazing way to use those word wall words!!
ESL is RAD!
TECH IN THE COUNSELING WORLD
While writing about teaching technology, we can’t pass up this opportunity to give a shout out to a few of our favs in counseling technology! EZanalyze is a fabulous, FREE, and easy to learn tool that keeps track of your time spent on different tasks- at my school. we use it to send a monthly report to admin that you can see here about the percentage of our time we spent on each of the four ASCA components. It also has a super password protected session log database with excellent confidentiality capabilities as long as you save it to a flashdrive rather than your school/business harddrive. And just in case you aren’t ready to embrace this advanced level of record-keeping technology, we have a simpler way to track your counseling time/duties using a chart, tally marks, and Excel- we have a free download of all this on our website. If you are interested, click this link and then scroll down and click on the Weekly/Monthly Counseling Reports icon.
A few other counseling techie tools that are wowing us are:
Mail Chimp which allows you to send super cool looking newsletters and even tracks who reads them! We are having lots of fun playing with this site in order to use it for our next seasonal newsletter.
We also aren’t embarrassed to admit that we still LOVE our old school Microsoft Outlook email signaturesthat allow us to tag all our work emails with this cool link directing parents/students to our latest counseling office newsletter!
Finally, we couldn’t live without our Google Docs here at Bilingual Learner as this is the way we make most of our free resources available to YOU! GD allows you to create word processing, data base, and spreadsheet docs and them store them on the internet and provide a password link to anyone you want to share them with. And as my school district starts embracing this amazing tool, I manage to stay one step ahead of them!
AND JUST IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING…
Individual Counseling Resources Coming! Also during the school year wrapup, we are in the throes of compiling the best individual counseling resources we have to share. Give us just a few more weeks to organize the last of our counseling materials that have spent this year strewn all over our counseling office in our daily mad dash to help kids. It’ll be worth the wait! For a little sneak peak, here’s our new staff feedback form– after we meet with a staff-referred student, we fill it out and give to it the staff member that referred that student to us so we can keep them in the loop about what interventions are occurring for their kiddo.
COPE INTO HOPE- Check it out by clicking this pic!
Spring Newsletter! Our Latest eblast is out with a chance to win a free copy of our new grief counseling guide, Cope into Hope!! And our summer eblast will offer a chance to win a free copy of our upcoming lessons guide, ESL for Beginners V.3! To get on our mailing list for a copy of our quarterly newsletter which has alerts and info about our ESL/counseling posts, freebies, promotions, guides, and other materials- please send an email to bilinguallearner@hotmail.com with NEWSLETTER in the subject line and we will add you to the mailing list. Or you can look to the right of your screen and sign up for our email newsletter there.
We Just Started Girl World! We just started writing our latest guide which will include 8 sessions of activities and info to empower girls ages 8-18 to be confident, productive members of society. Through team building activities such as role plays, art projects, discussions, and journaling, this guide will keep your girls sharing and caring about topics such as making friends, body image, fostering healthy relationships, avoiding rumors, and handling “mean girls.” Look for our new guide in both English and Spanish this summer! Follow us below on our Facebook or Twitter pages to find out our exact release date and to get our promotional discount price! (Check out our sneak peek at Girl World here!)
That’s all for today, Folks! We’d love to hear about YOUR favorite teaching or counseling technology, so please leave a comment below! Hope to see you back here the first Saturday in July for our next post! In the meantime, you can find out about our latest promotions, free stuff, or our counseling/ESL adventures by following us on our Facebook Page or Twitter Page.
Happy Fourth of July! If you are a dog lover and an American, you probably have experienced this puppy shaming to the right! We are experiencing it right now– all three of our furry friends are cowering under the desk as I write this post late Friday night. As always, we’ve included a lot of links as helpful resources on these topics- click on the blue links and we’ll take you right to an article, video, or product you can use!
Bilingual Learner 