Hi, Mike Reading here.
I’ve just been playing around with the Google Translate App, we have a few different teachers
who teach different languages and thought I’d just make a quick video to show you
how you could use the Google Translate App in your classroom.
So I’m just going to take my phone and open up the Translate App here and you’ll notice
that at the top there it says that we can translate from English to Spanish.
If I click on the Spanish word, I get all these different languages as options.
Now if you have a pin next to one of the language, what that means is that you can pin that language
as an offline option, so you don’t need the internet.
So that would be great if you’re traveling but it would also be fantastic for a school
that maybe has a little bit dodgy internet.
I’m going to leave it with Spanish at the moment.
And so there are four ways that you can get text or information into the app.
The first one is to just be able to type, so I’ll just type the world help and says
“Did you mean help?”
I say yes and you’ll see there on the bottom that it has the Spanish word there and it
gives you a little bit of dictionary just underneath it as well.
If you wanted to listen to what that sounded like, just click the little speaker icon next
to the word that says Spanish and it will say it for you.
You can also listen to it in English and you can obviously use the button between the English
and the Spanish words up the top to change the order of that.
So you can type, that’s fine.
The next way that we can use it is using this little scribble button which lets us draw
or write.
So if you wanted to write Japanese or maybe a Chinese Character or maybe in the example
we’re using with some Hebrew teachers, they wanted to know how they could type.
It also works for English so if I just type in here hello, you’ll see that it’s founded
at the top and it’s translated it for us just there.
So this works really, really well.
The other way that we can interact with this is to take a photo of something.
Now if you turn your camera on, I’m going to do two things.
One, I’ll just scribble down some text on my desk just here, so let me just take a picture
of that and you will see that Google now starts to scan it to see if it can rate any words.
The reason I wanted to do that was just to show you that it can pick up written words.
Now to translate, let’s just find the word more there so I can’t read my writing but
if I slide my finger over the word “More” what it does, you’ll see at the top there
it’s just translated for me.
I took a picture of a brochure, so obviously it’s got typed text.
So let’s just have a look at this one, it will obviously find all the words for us and
you can just slide your finger over the words and it will change them for you.
So really great for your students if they wanted to read something off a piece of paper
or a sign or if you’re traveling, fantastic option there as well.
Combine that with the fact that you could do this offline and it’s a fantastic tool.
The last way that you can interact is by using the microphone button and it just works like
Google now, you’d open up the microphone and just start to speak, it will pick up your
voice.
Now a couple of little options you’ll find here that once you’ve done a few translations
that you’ll have a history there which is great.
If you wanted to, you can create a phrase book by just clicking the stars.
So if you’ve got common terms and you don’t want to have to type it or say it all the
time, you can just create your phrase book just by clicking on the stars there.
The other thing that you can do is you can open up you r SMS App and translate SMSs that
are in there which may or may not be handy for you and you can clear your history there.
So that’s all just from that top right hand corner, the three dots.
You can access that.
So anyway, I hope you’ve found that informative.
If you’re a language teacher, the way I would use this with the students is not necessarily
get them to be lazy or not have to learn the language, sometimes teachers get a little
bit concerned about that.
What I would do is I would give them some text, let Google translate it and then have
a discussion about is it accurate or not?
The grammar is wrong and then that way you can actually create a fun activity for them
to interact with the text or the information but to be able to do it in a different kind
of way.
So this was not mean to replace languages by any means, in fact it can enhance your
language lessons.
So have a play with it and then in the comment section below, let me know what you think.
If you want to have more information about how you can best use Google Apps in the classroom,
then by all means, head over to www.googleapps4edu.com where you’ll find lots of other tips and
tricks.
The other think that you can do is you can subscribe to your YouTube channel and that
way you’ll get notified every time we create new videos.
Thanks for watching.