Weekly Newsletter
EWSD Multilingual Learner Program News
Quote of the Week
Multilingual Learner Program EWSD
Hello from your EWSD Coordinator of Multilingual Learner Programs
Hello Everyone! I’m thrilled to be joining the EWSD ELL team and would like to share a little bit about myself with you and my goals for the rest of the year. Here is a little bio with some additional information you may be interested in checking out.
Teaching Resources
Shared Resources
Thank you to EWSD ELL Teacher Stephanie Segretto for the Ramadan Resources for teachers!
Here’s another wonderful Ramadan resource shared by Kirstin Kollgaard (Winooski ML Program Director)
Free ELT Materials for raising awareness of refugee experiences through picturebooks (shared by Stephanie Vogel EL Title III Programs Director)
Youth Truth Surveys
Youth Truth Surveys
The Essex Westford School District has sent out the "Youth Truth" survey to families, students and teachers. The survey is available in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Russian, Korean, Mandarin. Anyone can access the link to the survey multiple times. Families and students must complete both surveys by April 29th.
ELLevation Executive Business Review Meeting
Thank you to Terri Geffert and Melanie Cote for joining the ELLevation EBR meeting on Friday, April 8th, 2022! The purpose of the meeting was to see how things are going with ELLevation, and learn about what the software can offer.
Things to Celebrate
We are logging in daily and using assigned services, supports and language goals!
There are over 200 saved reports just from this year!
The search/filter & dashboard language chart functions are helpful
The goals feature helps keep teams on track to ensure language objectives are taught and we are making progress to goals
Things to Explore
ELLevation has a form template function that could save us a lot of time inputting information into student letters to be sent home
Student schedules and staff can be automated so we can include general ed teachers in being able to view data
There is an impressive feature that we can look into acquiring that prepares entire lesson plans that are differentiated according to your student’s ACCESS scores. You can search for lesson plans by grade level, subject area and domain (skills that the students need to learn). Each lesson plan has content and language objectives, attached videos and readings and graphic organizers. Katie will be sending a screencast so we can all see those features.
Ordering for ELL Teachers
Thank you for your patience while ordering is all sorted out! I have made a lot of progress in the last few days. There is still more work to do in terms of adding vendors etc. You can see some notes on this spreadsheet. Once your order arrives, I will bring it over to you.
Translators/Interpreters
Thank you to all our translators for shifting over to Frontline! The goal of shifting to Frontline is to save time in entering requests for payment, and increase accuracy in payments.
We will also have a celebration event for Translators and Interpreters in June. All ELL teachers are invited! If you would like to help me plan this, please let me know.
Streamlining Requests for Translation
Director of Multilingual Learning, Kirsten Kollgaard from Winooski shared that they use the SolarWinds ticketing system to submit translation requests. We already have the KACE ticketing system here in EWSD (used by our IT department). It would be great to get a little group to pilot the KACE ticketing system. I believe it could save you time in reaching out to translators and take away the need to enter the information into the spreadsheet. If you are interested in piloting this with me, please let me know.
Organizations and Contacts
I’m reaching out to organizations, attending meetings and gathering contacts. If you know of any organizations or people that should be on our list to get to know, please feel free to add to this spreadsheet. It’s always good to have people to reach out to! Here is the collection so far: Vermont Organizations & Contacts.
Recommended Professional Development
If you know of an upcoming professional development opportunity, please add to the list. Let’s share what we find here ELL Conferences. I will be adding more to this list as we go too.
Newsletter Submissions
This newsletter will go out weekly and will be sent to ELL Teachers. It will also be linked in the district instructional newsletter section. If you have an announcement to share, please email it to tparks@ewsd.org with “Newsletter” in the subject line.