Teachers across our district work tirelessly to crush barriers to student learning. Armed with a desire to do whatever it takes, many rightly equip themselves with a tool set that includes technology in order to make themselves extremely effective at demolishing walls to student achievement.
Moodle is Multilingual
One barrier that is being dismantled is that of language. Teachers, such as Ms. Fatima Moussa and the rest of her ELL team at Edsel Ford High School, have recognized the benefits of using technology to neatly display and give timely feedback to students. She and the rest of her ELL Professional Learning Community use Moodle to help immerse students in the curriculum, learn vocabulary, and become better readers and writers. Teachers create, scaffold, and share activities. They also use data from assessments in Moodle to make accurate judgements about student learning progress and make sound instructional decisions.
An item from Ms. Moussa’s vocabulary test.
Takata Science
Then there’s Mr. Allen Takata from Unis Middle School. For many years, Mr. Takata has created his own instructional videos to help his students meet learning objectives. He uses his personal YouTube channel (Takata Science) to share and translate videos to 
Arabic. Lately, he’s been using the new H5P Plugin within Moodle to create interactive videos in which students respond to questions on the videos he makes while they watch.
Takata, who is not an Arabic speaker, also uses Google Translate to render the text of his Moodle quizzes in English and Arabic so students can read either and get closer to truly and more reliably demonstrating their understanding of the concepts. Takata does not speak the first language of a majority of his students, but due to his effective integration of technology, that doesn’t matter.
Using Moodle, Takata provides students with the opportunity to learn the content in Arabic if they so choose.
Flashback to Fakhreddine
And, of course, you recall back in October, we featured Ms. Jazaleh Fakhreddine, who is using Moodle in creative ways to accommodate students who are speakers of other languages. You’ll be hearing more from her in the coming weeks…
All of these teachers (and many more) are seeing to it that every child has access to learning. They’re sending walls crumbling. Their use of technology is eliminating barriers. It’s building bridges. It’s providing a vehicle to take students to farthest reaches of literacy and knowledge.