The increasingly rich cultural and language diversity in our schools offers great opportunities for our students to learn first-hand about the whole world right there in their classrooms. But it also challenges teachers to deliver instruction that nurtures students’ individual talents, fosters collaborative skills, and benefits from the diversity in the classroom. One way of doing it is through distributed learning environments, student-centered teaching approaches in which teachers assign different digital resources to different students who will later share expertise of the content that each of them learned. NSDL has a variety of resources to support instruction of multilingual learners such as the Earthquakes Around Us, in our Earthquake Education Environment collection, Mixing in Math from our SMILE Pathways partner, and the Plant and Soil Sciences eLibrary. You will find many more resources in the new NSDL Bilingual Resources page. Students could also work together in multilanguage groups using interactive sites in Spanish, such as the fascinating bilingual text and audio The Virtual Body graphics from our The Fun Works partners. If content for students’ projects is what you are looking for, check out our links to multilingual digital libraries such as biologia.org, a comprehensive resource in Spanish for biology accessible through our BEN-Biological Sciences Pathways and the Awesome Library in our NSDL General Science collection that includes very many disciplines and also English Language Arts and Social Studies, in more than 20 languages. Finally, collaboration could be full circle if English-speaking students could learn scientific terms in Spanish. Our Spanish resource from our Instructional Architect is only one example of many other resources in our collections can help teachers to do just that.

Keep checking the new NSDL Bilingual Resources page frequently as we will be adding more resources regularly.