Materials in Arabic

[Nina West]

30/03/2017 at 8:50 am

Hi

Like many schools we have Syrian refugees.  I have noticed that some get loads of support and others for whatever reason do not.  I have an S2 student choosing the subject in S3.  She speaks very little English.  I have made a few resources for the little time she has been in my class using google translate where she matches the Computing words to the image, and I have searched the internet for any resource in Arabic, which is surprisingly hard or I am just not looking in the right place.  I did come across the CS unplugged pdf in Arabic – but again I would never expect the girl to understand any of these concepts.  I was hoping that someone somewhere may be able to direct me in the direction of any basic Arabic resources for either ICT or Computing Science.  I have tried Amazon for books and have had no joy.

Any help would be very much appreciated.  I am also more than willing to email my basic sheets I have created should anyone need them.

Regards

Nina

[Darren Brown]

30/03/2017 at 12:37 pm

I’m not 100% sure but I think the main coding lessons on Code.org website can be switched to Arabic

[Carol Stewart]

18/04/2017 at 11:34 am

I have the same problem. I have a Syrian refugee in S4 who is superb at Maths and picks up practical work very quickly. Unfortunately his English isn’t good enough to understand the theory work and he requires a Computing Science Higher for University!  He also has a younger sister, who is in S2 at the moment who refuses to do any computer work as her English is so poor.

 

[Alex McNeice]

26/04/2017 at 11:57 am

I have a girl in S3 who joined us just after August (I think) and whilst it’s been tough, I think she’s enjoyed what we’ve done in class. I’ve tried to get her to do the same as everyone else wherever possible. As she walks into class, I usually give her a google translated document showing the overview of the lesson and anything specific I want her to do differently.

The practical skills lessons (graphics, coding e.t.c) have gone well as she responds well to demonstrations. We use Scratch in S3 and thankfully I could change the interface to Arabic but she stuck with English as it matched my demonstrations to the class) The theory side was more challenging (computer systems) and I’ve had to translate powerpoints and simplify a lot of the content to the bare essentials.

Because she answers questions by converting them into Arabic and then converting her answer into English, I’ve had to cut back on what I expect of her but she does try and I’m happy with that.

I’ve found Google’s translation to be good enough although pasting it into word has been problematic as word tries to change the formatting and some words look very different from the original source. I now paste into Notepad as that is an exact copy from Google.

I’m not sure if any of this helps anyone but I thought I’d share my experiences. It’s not been easy but I’ve had this kind of experience before – had a girl in S2 who only spoke Vietnamese.