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This Is Extraordinarily Excellent Advice On How To Use AI For Written Translation To Non-English-Speaking Parents/Guardians
It can obviously be a challenge for teachers to communicate with non-English speaking parents/guardians if the teacher doesn’t speak their home language. You can find lots of suggestions of how to communicate verbally in that situation at THE BEST RESOURCES TO HELP ELL STUDENTS WITH SIMULTANEOUS TRANSLATION IN THE CLASSROOM. Can Schools Trust AI to Translate for Non-English-Speaking Parents? is a very helpful Ed Week article related to written translation. The most important piece of advice, which I had never thought of before, can be found in the textbox at the top of this blog post. But Belle Li also offers two other good pieces of advice: And educators can check the quality of one AI platform’s translation by putting it into another AI application and asking that tool to translate the message back into English, Li suggested. Educators should also be transparent about using AI for translation, Li said. Many parents “know AI makes mistakes” and might appreciate the school’s effort to communicate with them in their language, despite the bumps.
Of course, AI should only be used to share positive news, “low-level” concerns, or non-critical information. In other cases, a human interpreter or trained translator should always be used. ADDENDUM: Ed Week has converted the article into a downloadable hand-out.      The Best Resources For Learning About The Student Protests In France HubertdeThé / Pixabay
The more I read about the high-school student-led protests in France, the more I’m impressed by them. Here are some resources to help learn about them. You might also be interested in The Best Resources Sharing The History Of Teens Organizing For Justice:
   
   Angry French students take to the streets. British students don’t – and I think I know why is from The Guardian.  This Week’s Free & Useful Artificial Intelligence Tools For The Classroom geralt / Pixabay
At least, for now, I’m going to make this a weekly feature which will highlight additions to THE BEST NEW – & FREE – ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOLS THAT COULD BE USED IN THE CLASSROOM: Sprinkles is yet another tool for creating stories for kids, but seems slightly better than some. Gapster is like an AI Mad Libs site. ChickyTutor isn’t free past the trial, but seems like a decent language-learning site. Why AI Hasn’t Transformed Math Instruction (and Probably Won’t) is from Ed Week. I Don’t Believe This Finding That AI Is Saving Teachers Six Weeks per Year is from Dan Meyer.  I like the idea in this post, but I’ve got lots of concerns about the prompts that are listed as “ethical.” I appreciate the use of concept attainment, but more and more I’m thinking that K-12 teachers need to limit AI use as much as possible, teach about AI ethics, but leave the teaching about how best to use AI to instructors at the university level. K-12 teachers just have enough on their plates. Good luck to university instructors!:
13 Powerful Studies That Tell the Story of AI is from Edutopia. What It’s Like to Grow Up With A.I.: The Winners of Our Multimedia Challenge is from The NY Times Learning Network. We designed an AI tutor that helps college students reason rather than give them answers is from The Conversation. I’m adding it to THE “BEST” TOOLS FOR TEACHERS TO CREATE THEIR OWN AI CHATBOTS.  Google Unveils An AI Game-Creating Tool That MIGHT Be Useful To ELLs, But It’s Certainly Not A “Game-Changer”
Google has a decidedly mixed track record in applying its AI capabilities towards something useful educationally. In fact, as many educators know, they actively using it to harm students by refusing to let schools turn-off its AI search capabilities for students in school. Apart from that terrible move, they’ve created lots of pretty useless AI tools. However, some of their attempts haven been exceptionally beneficial to English Language Learners, and I’ve written about them. Those include: Google Just Created A New AI Tool That Is Perfect For Teachers Of ELL Newcomers Google Now Makes It Easier To Create Songs With AI – Here’s How I Might Use It With ELLs Google’s New “Learn Your Way” Could Be Very Useful In Making Boring Textbooks More Accessible Google Translate Announced Improvements Today – It Just Keeps Getting Better And, of course, NotebookLM, now renamed Gemini Notebook can be useful to teachers (see The Best Resources For Teachers, Especially Those Teaching ELLs, To Learn About Google’s NotebookLM).
Today, Google announced a new AI tool called Playground. In theory, it lets you tell it the kind of online game you want and it will create it for you. I thought it might be useful to ELLs if they could create a game of their choice to practice whatever English vocabulary or grammar they might be studying at the time (similar to how researchers found that students using AI to create stories of their choice promoted reader engagement – see Who’d Have Thought? Students Who Prompt AI To Create Texts They’re Interested In Are More Likely To Want To Read Them). I tried creating games with specific prompts, like “Create a soccer game to teach English Language Learners the differences between has, have, and had.” It failed miserably. Finally, I just told it “Create a game to teach English Language Learners a game to teach the differences between has, have and had.” Success! Of course, that defeats the whole purpose of having students create a game of their own choice. Plus, there doesn’t seem to be anyway to embed the game. If students needed to go to Google Playground to play it, I’m sure they’d be distracted by all the other games other people had made. Once Google works out all the kinks and makes it more responsive, and once they make the games embeddable, it could be something to try in an English Language Learner classroom. Maybe.  World Food Day Is On Oct. 16th – Here Are Teaching & Learning Resources
The United Nations has declared that Oct. 16th is World Food Day. You might be interested in: The Best Sites To Learn About World Food Day The Best Resources For Helping Beginner ELLs Learn About Food The Best Sites For Learning About Nutrition & Food Safety  More Recent Articles
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