Feb 13, 2026 Reflection

This week we attended Pro-D sessions. I went for the session on Idéllo, which is a reading platform for French graded readers. The platform is primarily geared towards elementary French Immersion setting, however I learned in this session that they also have content for middle and secondary school years with a variety of compelling topics. Students of all ages can use this program to read and listen to stories at their level on computers or tablets, while teachers have the ability to monitor which books each student has in their library.

Idéllo also meets a lot of accessibility needs. Each story and article has an audio playback, as well as many ways of changing the visuals of the text such that the colour, size, and background of the text is customizable to each student’s needs. The students can also enter focus mode, in which turns the rest of the screen black and only highlights the line or words that they are currently reading. For all videos and narration, there is also the options of changing the voice between various voices that are male and female, and from Quebec or France, as well as the option of changing the speed. The workshop presenter suggested that 0.75 speed is the most popular for language learners as the normal speed can often be a little too fast.

This is definitely a resource that I will be using in my career as a French teacher, as it’s free for BC educators to make a class account, and is a very useful tool for encouraging literacy and reading among French language learners.

The biggest drawback for me right now with this resource is that UVic doesn’t have an account with them, so I will have to wait until I have a school account with a BC school district before I can familiarize myself with the site. Another shortcoming to note is that the resources on the site are currently arranged based on the Ontario curriculum, however they claim to be working on including BC and other provinces curriculum in the site, so by the time I am ready to use it with my own classes that might not be an issue any longer.