Use these tools to expose your students to other cultures and languages.
Using these tools, you can explore other countries thru their own web sites.
Multi-lingual Browsers & Translators
Filters:
Characters, Symbols and the Unicode Miracle
Tom Scott explains how Unicode and UTF-8 "hack" solved the problem of representing all the symbols, characters and letters that are used worldwide. Blame it all on the Internet. learn more
Emoji Unicode Tables
One way to get your students interested in all this is to bring up Emoji. This page lists many emoji characters and how they are displayed on different devices. learn more
Google Translate
Type text or a website address and Google can translate it into the language of your choice. Constantly improving and one of the better options out there. Some national library websites include English language resources. Many do not. Google Translate allows you to view an English language version of any web page. The translation is… learn more
Put yourself in a non-native speaker's shoes..
Want to give your students an idea of how a U.S. web site looks to a non-English speaker? Use Google Translate to convert a popular web site (or your school's web site) into something like Romanian, Filipino or Russian. Then ask them to find some item of information on the page. learn more
The Understanding Language Initiative
The Understanding Language Initiative, developed at Stanford by well-respected specialists in the ELL world, links the common core standards in science with literacy. This site provides resources to educators so they will be equipped to enable learning the more demanding content in science standards. learn more
Unicode Character Blocks
The Unicode standard arranges groups of characters together into blocks. Blocks include everything from Basic Latin characters (which includes English), Greek, Arabic and Thai to Emoticons, Currency Symbols and Mathematical Operators. This resource lists the complete list of blocks currently defined and allows you to see which characters your web browser can display. learn more
Using Google Chrome's built in translation service
If you use the Google Chrome browser, this resource shows you how you can change the language Chrome uses and have Chrome translate webpages for you. learn more