Appreciating an opportunity to enhance student's abilities!

Due to the Power to Learn grant in Spring Branch ISD this year...specifically at Spring Woods Middle, my ELL Newcomer students have excelled in their English language learning. They have needed to use and know many words in English just to navigate, search and report on various topics in Social Studies and Language Arts. The motivation of using an IPOD or a Net book is so great that they will research and learn whatever they have to as long as they can use the computers. Blogging has been a wonderful tool for them to comment on the various projects that students have done. By learning just how much English they ALREADY knew simply because of the cognates in English and Spanish, students have moved quickly up the scale of knowledge. The technology that we have been given through the grant has been a God Send! The students love to go to Brain Pop, StoryBird, Tumblebooks and more, as long as they are on their mini's. They will do any thing asked of them on the IPOD Touch and finding sites to practice English spelling, common words, pronunciation has been wonderful for the new language learners. Next year I plan to use the minis more for researching areas in American History and more for creating stories of their own. This was an experimental year and it has been very successful! Thanks to our wonderful leader, Laurie Pickup who wrote and encouraged the grant!