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Lingo Hut allows the learner to select their native language and then the language they want to learn.  After this you are able to participate in a series of exercises for Reading, Listening and Speaking.

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learn a foreign language arabic chinese dutch english french german hebrew hungarian italian japanese polish portuguese russian spanish swedish turkish vocabulary

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Learn a new language for free. Learn a foreign language. What language do you want to learn?

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Story Online has a good selection of books to access online with Teacher Guides including CCSS for ELA, Social Studies and Science.  However, it does not list any ELP standards so you will have to incorporate those for yourself.  Stories are read by SAG Actor Foundation members

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This website gives a list of other sites that are specific to Elementary English Language Learners

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This website gives a list of other sites that are specific to Elementary English Language Learners

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Elementary Web Sites for English Language Learners

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Attention all elementary ESL and classroom teachers! Do you want to discover great web sites for the English language learners in your class? Here is a painless way to give students English language practice in the classroom or at home.

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This site has resources for Educators as well as Families.  There are also videos you can access.  It is pretty comprehensive in that Teachers, Schools and Families have information available that is specific to their needs.

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This site has resources for Educators as well as Families.  There are also videos you can access.  It is pretty comprehensive in that Teachers, Schools and Families have information available that is specific to their needs.

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A bilingual site for educators and families of English language learners

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This site has a wide number of resources for your access on ESL Education

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This site has a wide number of resources for your access on ESL Education

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The latest news and resources in education since 2007

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This TESOL blog reflects on various TED Talks

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This TESOL blog reflects on various TED Talks

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A little while back, I wrote about the site News in Levels and how perfect it was for listening practice, especially for mixed level classes. While I have used it with students in the past, in the intensive English program that I am a part of now, I've found that TED Talks are even better, so I wanted to share that site with you just in case you missed Alexandra Lowe's TED Talks post last year.

If you have never watched a TED Talk before, you really need to. You can find them on just about every topic and they often challenge you to think in a different way. They are usually fairly short with the ones I have used ranging from 5 to 15 minutes. This length makes them perfect for use in the classroom or even as homework assignments.

Personally, I use TED Talks more than News in Levels now because of the program I am in. The students here are learning academic English and preparing to enter the university as degree-seeking students. It is imperative that they be able to handle a certain language level and learn how to take notes from which to study. I have found many TED Talks at the appropriate level for these students and many others that are, in my opinion, far too challenging simply because of the complex nature of the topics.

For our listening and speaking courses, we use a series called Contemporary Topics from Pearson Longman. In level one of that series, there is a unit on genetically modified food, and I used the TED Talk by Birke Baehr as an extension activity. I love this video because it is of a young speaker flawlessly delivering a powerful message on that topic. I used this video to continue our discussion about the topic introduced in our textbook and also to help students prepare to give their own presentations about various topics.

That is just one example. If you are looking for more, Alexandra shared some of her experiences with TED Talks on the TESOL blog too. She highlighted two other talks that worked with lower level students, so they really are not just for your advanced students and are truly exceptional for authentic listening practice.

With the variety of TED Talks out there, you are bound to find something related to a topic relevant to your course and/or students and between the free videos and transcripts, there is a lot to work with. You can have students improve their note-taking, listening, and discussion strategies or focus in on just one of those skills. If you have never considered TED Talks before, think about it now and see what you can find.

About Tara Arntsen

Tara Arntsen recently completed her Master's degree in Teaching-TESOL at the University of Southern California. She currently teaches in the Intensive English Program at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota. She has taught ESOL in China, Japan, and Cambodia as well as online. Her primary interests are communicative teaching methods and the use of technology in education.

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TED Talks for English Language Teaching | TESOL Blog

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A little while back, I wrote about the site News in Levels and how perfect it was for listening practice, especially for mixed level classes.

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TED Talk from ESL teacher in Malaysia highlighting ways to enhance traditional teaching methods.

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TED Talk from ESL teacher in Malaysia highlighting ways to enhance traditional teaching methods.

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BIO

Maggie Muuk teaches English as a Second Language in Malaysia. As a TED-Ed Innovative Educator, she is devoted to finding new ways to enhance traditional teaching methods.

IDEA

Students can increase their global and cultural competency by learning how to share ideas in another language. For ESL teachers, blended learning tools can be a great way to improve student writing skills and language comprehension.

INNOVATION PROJECT

In Malaysia, there is a limited amount of time in class for students to share their thoughts in English. Maggie introduced Padlet as a way for students to share ideas in English at their own pace. See how she did it, here.
Below, read Maggie's tips on introducing new tech tools in a traditional school environment with limited Internet access: This article is part of the TED-Ed Innovation Project series, which highlights 25+ TED-Ed Innovation Projects designed by educators, for educators, with the support and guidance of the TED-Ed Innovative Educator program. You are welcome to share, duplicate and modify projects under this Creative Commons license to meet the needs of students and teachers. Art credit: Shutterstock.

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Introduce online education tools for English language learners

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Maggie Muuk teaches English as a Second Language in Malaysia. As a TED-Ed Innovative Educator, she is devoted to finding new ways to enhance traditional teaching methods. Students can increase their global and cultural competency by learning how to share ideas in another language.

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This website provides an opportunity for learners to work on listening skills in authentic ways.

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This website provides an opportunity for learners to work on listening skills in authentic ways.

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Kerys talks about where she is from and all the places she has lived.

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This site provides engaging ways through music to incorporate content vocabulary.

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This site provides engaging ways through music to incorporate content vocabulary.

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Educational Hip-Hop Songs & Videos for All Subjects, K-12

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Flocabulary is a library of songs, videos and activities for K-12 online learning. Hundreds of thousands of teachers use Flocabulary’s educational raps and teaching lesson plans to supplement their instruction and engage students. Our team of artists and educators is not only committed to raising test scores, but also to fostering a love of learning in every child.

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As I worked on this Tech Springboard assignment I was surprised at the amount of online resources that are available.  I found that it is a little more challenging to find ones for Elementary students however.  Even so it really helped me to gain some good resources that I can use in the future that will be easy to access and engaging for my students.
I also found that this is a very time consuming process initially. Having assignments and forums such as we are doing helps educators to be able to find access to sources and cut down the amount of time it takes to do so. I always find working as a team is far more advantageous than working alone. I appreciate the insights and skills others have.

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This site includes a variety of graphic organizers as well as other resources in both Spanish and English

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This site includes a variety of graphic organizers as well as other resources in both Spanish and English

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Causes and Effect English / Spanish Chart to Classify Summarize information in charts and other graphics English / Spanish Chicago Century of Changes English / Spanish

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Storyboards are the focus here.  Engaging students in creatives ways to tell a story.

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Storyboards are the focus here.  Engaging students in creatives ways to tell a story.

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Free Storyboarding Software — Online Storyboard Creator

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Storyboard That: Easy online storyboard creation! Perfect for filmmakers, teachers, and students. Create storyboards and comics with Storyboard That today!

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Thesaurus and word tools for your creative needs. Find the word you’re looking for!

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Provides an online medium for Educators as well as Students to collaborate with their peers.

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Provides an online medium for Educators as well as Students to collaborate with their peers.

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Free Online Textbooks, Flashcards, Adaptive Practice, Real World Examples, Simulations

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CK-12 Foundation provides a library of free online textbooks, videos, exercises, flashcards, and real world applications for over 5000 concepts from arithmetic to history

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This is a tool for helping educators scaffold instruction through the use of various sentence frame tools.

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This is a tool for helping educators scaffold instruction through the use of various sentence frame tools.

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This technique gives students the opportunity to respond in the form of a complete sentence to effectively communicate. Sentence stems provide scaffolding to help students get started in speaking or writing without the added pressure of thinking about how to correctly formulate a response.

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This site provides the opportunity to use pre-made rubrics or create your own. It also connects you to other sites that provide useful tools such as graphic organizers.

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Rubric Maker - Create custom assessments

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Create rubrics for your classroom projects.

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This site has a wide range of tools available. From activities, games, worksheets, quizzes, videos and more. Engaging and motivating for students in multiple models of language.

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Welcome to Fun English Games for Kids! Find a wide range of free teaching resources that are perfect for students learning English, ESL classes and teachers looking for ideas online.

Enjoy interactive games, classroom activities, printable worksheets and more!

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english games activities kids online educational learning fun cool free children students letters words puzzles spelling reading writing grammar play free teaching resources studying learn practice exercises

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Fun English Games for Kids - Free Interactive Learning Activities Online

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Enjoy a wide range of fun, interactive English games and activities that are perfect for kids learning English as well as teachers looking for free educational resources online.

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This site will help you create grade level specific Jeopardy games

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Create your own jeopardy template online, without PowerPoint. Or browse the pre-made templates created by other people!

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This helpful blog gives ways to evaluate student progress using alternative methods of assessment.

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Seeing growth and improvement can be a huge motivator for ELL students.

But you can't see growth if you don't measure it.

That's why no great class is complete without some way of assessing students.

Not only is it a fantastic way for both you and your students to see what they've learned, but you can also use the results to help you plan future lessons.

However, don't rely solely on tests to assess your students!

They're not always an accurate way to measure their skill levels. Instead, I have five alternative ways you can assess your ELL students, and examples of what each might look like. But first, let's take a closer look at the issue with tests.

Contents

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere.Click here to get a copy. (Download)

Why Tests Aren't an Accurate Way to Measure Performance

One of the most common reasons why teachers shouldn't only use tests is because students may have test anxiety. What tends to happen is that students are so nervous when presented with a test that they don't do as well. You then aren't able to see what the student is really capable of. For ELL students, they can be extra nervous because not only do they have to recall information they've learned, but they may have to decipher what the test question is asking in the first place.

Also, tests really only measure what students can memorize or recall, not necessarily what work they can produce. For example, if you give a multiple choice test about vocabulary they learned, it really only tests if they understand one meaning of the word, and not necessarily whether they understand how to apply the same word in different contexts.

Another example would be oral skills. If students understand certain phrases you've taught them, they may not understand if another person outside the classroom says it, especially if that person has an accent.

If an ELL student is a little slower to read or decipher material (especially if they've had lots of support in their class), a time constraint on a test won't give them sufficient time to complete the test. Just because a student didn't finish a test, doesn't mean they don't understand the material. You then are left guessing as to whether or not your student actually understood what you were testing them on.

So how can you start assessing English language learners without tests?

5 Alternative Ways to Assess English Language Learners

1. Rubrics and Performance Criteria

Using rubrics and performance criteria is a great way to assess a variety of student work. It's usually based on language proficiency and academic progression through work such as presentations, written assignments and reading activities. You can not only use these to grade your students, but to chart their growth over a set period of time.

Both tools feature a list of criteria or standards that students know you're assessing. Rubrics show what is considered below level, at level and above level. A performance criteria can simply be a checklist of what to assess for each student. With either of these assessment tools, it's important to develop your own, as assessments are based on the teacher's judgment.

A tool like RubiStar is helpful, as it can show you sample rubrics other teachers have developed, and anyone can modify them for their own use.

When creating rubrics or performance criteria, make sure that what you're assessing is clear and fair from the beginning. As well, don't assess too much at once, as it'll not only overwhelm you but your students as well. If it helps, ask other teachers how they created their rubrics, or simply have someone look over yours to see if it looks okay.

You can even take it a step further by bringing FluentU into the classroom.

Using authentic content in the target language is a great way to let your students see the language used in context-and FluentU has a wide array of videos to choose from. From music videos and movie trailers to interesting talks, you can use these videos in your English lessons to help immerse your students in the language. You can even assign homework for your students to complete outside of the classroom and monitor their progress.

2. Oral Presentations or Performances

Many students who have test anxiety might get nervous because their reading or writing skills aren't very good. That doesn't mean, however, that they aren't proficient in oral skills.

Assessing oral presentations or performances typically include role-plays, interviews, oral reports and summarizing/paraphrasing pieces of text. When used on an ongoing basis, it's a great way to monitor a student's comprehension through a longer period of time.

Here are some ideas to incorporate oral presentations or performances as part of your assessments:

Role-plays: Role-plays can be used to assess students individually or as a group. Some ideas include having students write a play and performing it or even having the students teach the teacher as part of a review class.

Interviews: This type of assessment is very helpful if you have students that are early English learners. To help test students on content knowledge, try to use a lot of visual cues. For example, have students pick from a pile of pictures, and ask questions to elicit responses from them. You can assess the student based on vocabulary used or comparing concepts.

Describing/explaining/retelling/paraphrasing/summarizing texts: Instead of a written book report or summary of a piece of text, you can have your students retell the plot in front of the class or just to you. Other ideas can include asking the students to pick a character in the book and tell a story from their point of view, or even to describe their favorite part of the text.

When assessing oral work, it's helpful to use a checklist of things to look for, such as pronunciation, volume, pace and content. Use the same checklist for the same types of oral presentations to see the progression over time.

3. Non-verbal Assessments

For students who are shy or aren't as proficient in English, using non-verbal assessments is a great way to see a student's academic progress. What you're looking for in this type of assessment is their understanding of vocabulary.

Examples include:

Charades: Give a student vocabulary words you've taught, and have them act it out to see if they understand what the word or concept is. You could even have them summarize a text by miming it.

Pictures: You can ask students to draw or collect pictures to show their knowledge on a topic. For example, if you're assessing a student on their knowledge of nouns, ask students to pick out pictures of nouns in a magazine. Pictures can also be used to assess reading comprehension. Students can read a paragraph and then draw a picture to show their understanding of the text. If the picture is mostly accurate except for a few details, it could be a vocabulary issue.

4. Written Assessments

Written assessments are a nice way to see how students can apply their knowledge of English over a wide variety of concepts. For example, you can use assignments to see just how well they understand a text, or even different forms of writing.

Some different ways to incorporate written assessments in your class include:

Creative and structured writing assignments: Ask students to write a creative story, or even give them a writing prompt-where students read the beginning of a story and are asked to write the ending.

Editing writing: Give students a piece of text with grammatical mistakes and ask them to correct it, to test their knowledge of grammar.

Reading response logs: Give students a list of questions, such as how do they know a character is evil, or how would they change the ending of a story. When students are finished reading a book or article, have them write down the answers to these questions. Make sure to only assess for content, and not spelling or grammar, unless you specify to your students that you're doing so.

Content logs: Have students write down facts they learned about a text. You can also have them write what parts they didn't understand. This is helpful for you to see if there are concepts you may need to reteach or review, particularly if a lot of students are confused about similar parts of the same text.

With writing, don't assess too much at once. For a writing piece, you could assess just spelling, complete sentences or unity in paragraphs. Build it up to assess more than a few criteria once you see that your students have mastered what you have taught them.

5. Portfolios

Portfolios are powerful assessments and are used to gather various samples of student work to track their development over a period of time. In order to maximize the potential of using a portfolio as an assessment tool, you should regularly curate student work to include in them, and have scheduled conferences with students about their work.

You should also have a checklist of qualities that are important to showcase student achievement. Not only do you critique and assess the work, but so should the students. That way, they're responsible for their learning and take more ownership of making sure they improve.

Material you can include in a portfolio can include the following:

performance criteria or rubrics

recording of oral presentations

tests

writing samples, drafts and final copies

book reports

interview checklists

In order to best assess a student, you should include more than one kind of student work in the portfolio. The work does not have to be the best work they've done, rather a wide variety is best. Based on your judgment, you can even ask students for their opinion as to what types of work they should include.

In a portfolio, you are looking for any type of improvement in their work. For example, if you keep a couple of a student's writing pieces, look to see if their sentence or paragraph structure gets better. When looking at tests, see if their spelling tests, for example, have gotten higher scores over time. If you notice that they continually lack in certain skills, this would be the time to address it. You can either give the student extra support in class or find ways for them to practice with extra work at home.

Tests aren't bad, but they're not the only way to assess student achievement.

If you use a wide variety of assessments, you'll be able to portray an accurate picture of your student's English abilities.

In turn, you, your students and their parents will be able to see their progress, which can greatly motivate students!

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere.Click here to get a copy. (Download)

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Measuring Growth: 5 Ways to Start Assessing English Language Learners Without Tests | FluentU English Educator Blog

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Assessing English language learners with a range of assessments will help demonstrate your students' abilities. From written assessments and portfolios to speaking assessments and activities, there are so many options available! Click here to see 5 simple alternatives to tests for assessing English language learners!

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Student driven method for empowering students to "show what they know" through various using photos, videos, drawings, text, PDFs, and links. Accessible by teachers from any type of device.

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Seesaw | Elementary Learning Experience Platform

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Seesaw | Elementary Learning Experience Platform

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Elementary Learning Experience Platform | Seesaw

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Seesaw is a Learning Experience Platform with 25M+ users, enhancing elementary education, engagement, and school culture while improving academic success.

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A fun way to gather information for data driven instruction. This site provides the educator the ability to determine the reading level for individual students. It also has English and Spanish songs, books and poems.

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This site has several games in Spanish and English that are specifically helpful for math. They present well known characters in an engaging method for learners.

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Play games in Spanish featuring your favorite PBS KIDS characters like the Curious George, Oh Noah!, and Cat in the Hat.

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This app allows students to create presentations of their work. Fun and interactive.

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Read reviews, compare customer ratings, see screenshots, and learn more about Puppet Pals HD. Download Puppet Pals HD and enjoy it on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

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This engaging site allows students to record their own stories! What more could a budding author want?

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In life, with most things, my philosophy includes seeking balance.  I find that not just one way of doing things is the best for any one person.  I believe that as educators we need to invest time into getting to know and build relationships with our students.  Once we have become versed in this it is my feeling that greater learner occurs.  This is where opening up our practices to include technology comes into play.
Through models such as SAMR teachers are able to identify their student's abilities in more authentic methods.  For instance, an educator can assign a task involving technology that will be more manageable for an emergent bilingual student to navigate and demonstrate their comprehension in a content area in a more effective way than just paper and pencil assessment.
Using SAMR to integrate technology also provides for differentiation.  The use of technology provides a gateway to the use of realia in which students can have a higher level of rigor.
It is my belief that ultimately educators need to look beyond the standard and traditional means of teaching and assessing not only English Language Learners, but all students. A one size fits all approach is suffocating and hinders the progress of helping students to become lifelong learners.