10 Tech Tools for Engaging Your ELLs

Whether you’re teaching in a classroom or teaching online, these tech tools can help you organize more engaging and effective class experiences with your ELs. 

In this article, you’ll learn about some of the best educational technology available to you.

  • Seesaw – You can complete assignments assigned in Seesaw by recording audio or video, drawing, labeling, or writing. (The link is for an article I wrote with some ideas about how to use Seesaw.)
  • Pear Deck – This is another tool built on Google Sheets. You can create interactive content for your slides including giving formative assessments, inserting interactive question types, adding audio, etc.
  • Nearpod – This is a little more complex, but you can make your own interactive videos including virtual reality, simulations, and gamified quizzes.
  • Flippity – Turn Google Spreadsheets into interactive flash cards and games.
  • Flipgrid – This is like a forum, but with videos. Create a topic and students respond by recording a video.
  • Kahoot – This is an article I wrote on Kahoot which has some videos and links for ideas. Carol Salva is the person to go to when it comes to Kahoot.
  •  Quizlet – Very popular tool for creating interactive content beyond just quizzes for students to complete and get immediate feedback.
  • Jamboard – Create a board where students can share pictures, text, sticky notes and move everything around easily for a collage like collaboration. This is an article about how to use Jamboard and 10 activity ideas.
  • Wakelet – Create blog-post like pages for your students that pull in content from around the web. 

Course Content for Classroom or Distance Learning


If you need resources to assign online or in the classroom, join the Kid-Inspired ESL Curriculum Membership or the Interactive Online ESL Curriculum Membership.

Our materials were built with the goal of making asynchronous learning easy. If you are doing distance learning, the Interactive Online ESL Curriculum Membership includes PPT files as well as interactive online lessons you can use with your students.

  • The speaking sheets for example provide pictures for students to make sentences about and a built-in challenge to see how many sentences they can make in a minute. You can create a video or audio of example sentences in an app like Flipgrid or Youtube and students can respond with video or audio of themselves making their own sentences about the pictures. 
  • The discussion pages work perfectly in a forum. You can set up the questions in a group meeting or a pre-recorded video and then, in a forum, students can choose which question they’d like to respond to, using the example sentence starters provided if they need. Then students can respond to each other’s responses inside the forum.
  • The Literacy Lessons can be used in a variety of ways in a distance learning format. Students can record themselves reading the passages or they can respond to the text using one or more of the included graphic organizers. 

There are 1000s of resources inside the membership and 1000s of ways they could be used in combination with the above free tools to create engaging and effective lessons with your ELLs.

What is your favorite tech tool for class? Leave me a note in the comments!

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