Need Help Communicating with Spanish-Speaking Families? Five Tools to Help Bridge the Language Barrier?
Are your messages home getting lost in translation? Do you wish you had more Spanish language materials at your fingertips to help communicate with families? These tools might be able to help.
Casa Notes: Note templates for field trip permissions, student contracts, invitation to parent-teacher conferences, etc. Users are given the option of printing the notes in Spanish or English.
Colorin Colorado: Colorin Colorado is an incredibly useful website full of ESL resources for teachers and families. There are numerous communication and parent education tools translated into Spanish. Here are a few examples (click on the Spanish tab at the top of each article to see/print the Spanish language version):
- Who's Who at your Child's School
- Parent-Teacher Conferences Explained
- Reading Tip Sheets for Parents (differentiated by age)
iVoice Translator Pro ($0.99) is an app that can act as a double-sided translation service, allowing the other person to speak back to the app. Other apps share this capability, but iVoice has a more user-friendly interface for displaying these translated conversations.
Word Lens is a free app that can snap a photo of written text, menus, and street signs in a foreign language and translate them into the user's native language. Word Lens was recently acquired by Google for a planned integration into the Google Translate service.
Google Translate is a free, web-based translation service that provides instant translations between dozens of different languages. It can translate words, sentences and web pages between any combination of languages.
