As a science teacher with very little training in how to best support English Language Learners (ELLs) in my classroom, I’ve always spent time early in the school year showing students how to use the automatic translation tools in Google Docs to convert content that I create in English to their first language.

That process is pretty darn seamless at this point — and while native speakers often report that Google translations aren’t perfect, they are certainly a good starting point for giving my English Language Learners chance to wrestle with the concepts and completing the assignments that we are working on in class.

But here’s the hitch: having spent the past year teaching virtually in a pandemic, EVERYTHING that I use to sequence lessons is now in Google Slide Decks — and, as of this moment, there is no built-in translation support for Slides.

That’s made the beginning of the school year difficult for a student in my room who speaks Russian. Let’s call him Alek*.

Alek has done a great job on everything that I share in Google Docs format. He translates the documents, reads the content and questions in Russian, and responds to prompts in English.

But when it comes to the content-heavy slides that I share as a part of direct instruction each day, he struggles.

What breaks my heart is watching how hard he TRIES to translate the content on my Slides. Sometimes, I see him typing entire slides into Google Translate on the web to see what they say. Other times, I see him holding his iPod up in front of his computer screen, using the “camera translate” feature to instantly translate whatever is on his screen.

This is a kid who is driven to learn, y’all.

That’s why I’m on a mission to find a Google Add-on that can be used to automatically translate slides into different languages.

Right now, none are approved for use by my district — but I’m hoping that with a bit of experimenting, I can at least offer a few starting points for the technology services team to investigate.

The Add-on that I’m tinkering with today is called Translate My Slide — and it’s pretty promising.

Check this out:

Now, I’m no pro at understanding the privacy risks that I’m taking by installing this add-on, even if I DID read the privacy policy.

And I won’t tell Alek to install the add-on himself until I run this whole project past the way-more-qualified-than-I-am folks in the technology services division of my school district.

But bare minimum, I’m going to start giving Alek copies of my slides that I translate for him. It’s not hard to do, the final product is a reasonable translation of my content, and with these translated slides, Alek will be able to follow along with what I’m projecting on my screen.

My hope is that eventually my district will identify and approve an add-on that is safe for students to use to do this kind of work.

Slide decks are not an uncommon way for teachers to communicate information to students — particularly in older grade levels. Ensuring that students can easily translate that content into their primary language is an easy step that we can take to empower the English Language Learners in our room.

Building confident learners means showing them the tools that are available to solve any problem — and translation add-ons for Slide decks is definitely one of those tools.

(*Name changed to protect Alek’s identity.)

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