MindMeister

A little more on MindMeister which I mentioned yesterday. I've used it this last couple of days for assignment planning with a student who has used both Inspiration and Bubbl.us. We have used it in three ways, us both sitting at a single computer, us both sitting at adjacent computers and both updating different sections, such as me correcting spelling, and from home with her updating and me changing layout after she has finished editing. The finished maps look great. They can be printed very easily to pdf, which may leave quite small print on a large map. The rtf print option is useful too for making notes for putting things in order if your plan is leading to an essay or assignment. You can compare the output with one I produced with bubbl.us, and posted here. You can centre the embedded map below with your mouse. The one drawback I have seen is that you can only have six maps with the free version.

Newly Discovered Elearning Sites

These are three sites I have come across recently which could be interesting in very different ways.

First off is Inspiration Lane, a magazine cum blog for ESOL from America, run by Susan Alyn. It is really a compendium of teaching ideas; in part it makes use of daily links so that you can always have something fresh to use, such as caption writing or recipe reading, just as useful for literacy teaching as for ESOL.

Second is Rash Kath's set of blogs from India. Although they relate to her primary maths teaching it is a really inspiring way of using elearning. I started from Planet Infinity, her class blog, but look through all her blogs for the nuggets useful for numeracy. There are some useful videos for techniques - I like the one for multiplying by 11. I also like the teaching idea for adding time. There ought to be a repository of ideas like this. Her videos are short and simple as they should be.

Finally there is MindMeister which has knocked bubbl.us off the number one slot for online mindmapping. It's not quite as easy to get going, but it is more aligned to commercial software and has good printing controls. The free version is fine - just sign up and get started.

Busy, Support Materials

I seem to have been busy this term, but it has surprised me to find it is almost 3 months since anything has been added here or since a proper update of the website. I have added one or two links and today's update is only because there are a couple of outstanding sites I have come across in the past couple of days. See next post.

My online energies have been taken up with learning materials for additional learning support. Anyone who has looked will have realised that there is nothing out there. I have therefore been trying to write some, designed to run in Moodle when tutors are teaching alongside curriculum teachers. The key word is differentiation. I'm trying to use video with quizzes at different levels.

In the meantime I keep searching for something useful for the site. The only link I know of value is inevitably Maggie Harnew, who has a page of contextualised resources on her wonderful site.

Dead Links, Peter Symonds College

At this time of year I usually go through all the links on the Skills for Life website, trying to find those addresses that have changed or no longer exist. I'm slower this year as a result of being off sick for ten days and working in a new office with less easy, temporarily I hope, access to IT. It's always a slow process as you cannot be sure that a great site has gone just because it is not there today - it may be just down today and back in business tomorrow. I've tried using an online verifier this year but it has introduced new difficulties.

One of the first problems I discovered was that those great learning resources from Peter Symonds College were now behind a password on their intranet. It has been sadly the case that the number of interactive resources has not increased much over the years, as sites are protected or go subscriber only. Luckily I searched around the college's main site and discovered the Peter Symonds resources here. I've tried to update all relevant links.

Word Sorting for Spelling

The activities linked from this page on the Houghton Mifflin site are a series of word sorting exercises to assist spelling. This one for example looks at different spellings for the "er" sound. The site is American, aimed at primary school grades and is very difficult to find what you are looking for. But these include exactly the sort of activities I've been looking for - sorting things into different categories. I'd like to be able to create them myself and have looked at ways of doing it. That seems to be to learn Flash, obtain the software and do it myself. That's a long process.

I'll try to find my way through this site and link some specific activities. At that point I'll find it useful.

Skillswise E3

I have added links for the materials under Skillswise E3. This includes direct links to the individual modules under Activities English and Activities Maths. This represents a substantial new body of teaching and learning resources, and I hope they will be useful as the Level 1 resources, and I'm certainly looking forward to using some of them in the new term.

The E3 resources follow the same pattern as the L1 stuff: factsheets, worksheets, games for some the units, multiple choice quizzes and tutor notes. The style is just the same. This means that everything is safe and reliable, but that nothing is cutting edge.

I use the Level 1 resources pretty regularly, especially quizzes and worksheets where I do not have my own, or which I know work well and so I have not bothered to write my replacements. Some of the games are good and some not so good, some the learners like and some they do not see the point of. I remember what I want to avoid for the most part. What I have looked at so far of E3 looks good.

It's worth reflecting that the BBC needs to take considerable credit for sponsoring the Skillswise initiative. In terms of online literacy and numeracy learning, for many people Skillswise is still the beginning and the end. It's great to have it, but it would have been interesting to see some of the materials trying something less traditional.

Basic Skills Agency

Last week saw the passing of an era with the incorporation of the English side of the Basic Skills Agency into NIACE. I had noticed that the BSA had launched a new website recently, while some of their project sites and the Observatory had disappeared. The Wales sites are so far unaffected. I have tried to reflect these changes on the Background page.

NIACE and Tribal have formed the Alliance for Lifelong Learning to work in the "field of literacy, language and numeracy to form the country's leading concentration of expertise across all age ranges." So says the NIACE news report. It remains to be seen what this means in practice.

The BSA grew out of ALBSU which formed an important part of my learning to be a basic skills practitioner. In the Eighties their training was central to many of us developing practice in London and probably in other parts of the country as well. In the early nineties I managed an ALBSU funded Open Learning Centre and was impressed by the commitment to innovation in practice. Things were changing though; ALBSU became the BSA, the training element declined in quality and was eventually discarded, the BSA became involved in schools, the tone became more authoritarian "this is the way to do things", the New Labour Government established ReadWrite+, and the BSA became less relevant. Last year saw the departure of Alan Wells who had been at the helm since before my own interest. Where next? Who knows?

Gordons

I have added some more links on Maths Activities to the excellent Gordons numeracy activities. I added a first batch a few months ago, but had always been aware that there were more that were useful. I have tried to concentrate on learners working towards E3, L1 or L2 as these are my core audience. Gordons generally aim to develop mental maths skills, such as subtraction with a number line and halving and doubling. It is worthwhile looking through the whole suite and seeing what is useful for your own teaching.

These activities can be used in different ways. Many will work best on a projector - they are designed as interactive whiteboard activities - and these can also be used one to one, which is how I use them. Some allow for answer entry and so could be used for individual work under supervision. I would hope that any numeracy classroom in a college would have a projector attached to the internet these days, but I know from experience how far this is from the truth.

Social Networking and Skills for Life

There has been one positive step forward for me from recent training I've given on elearning - I can now see the application of social networking for literacy or numeracy learners. A colleague tipped me off about Ning, which is a service which allows you to set up online social networks. A participant at one of the sessions thought that social networking was the Web 2.0 tool for her Entry Level learners, because many used or were interested in MySpace, but she was anxious about the open nature of most networks.

Ning was right for her because you set up a private network for free and enrol your learners on it. They can then link with each other, post photographs, make comments and blog posts. The Ning site can act as the social centre of your course or group and you can introduce as much educational content as you wish. I can easily see the application of this with younger FE learners.

Anyone interested can check out Classroom 2.0, which is a network for educators running on Ning, mainly from the schools sector in the US inevitably. It does show the power of the platform, and you can learn a lot about the practical applications of Web 2.0 if you follow the links and discussions.

Quizzes for Number Bonds

I added a few quizzes yesterday to the Maths Quizzes and Maths Activities section to help one of my students with her number bonds. I've not done much work with Entry Level numeracy of late; this learner wants to do numeracy next year and is almost at Entry 2.

I was aware that there a couple of other good resources around: the NNS Number Facts one, which involves counting, and the Ambleside game which involves typing in answers. I may use these, but drag and drop matching still seems to hit all the right keys. By moving one number to the other you make an association of the two numbers together in the head, maybe with a picture or a sound depending on learning style. The drag and drop brings in a kinaesthetic element. It is a simple game, no typing, no counting, easy to do (and easy to create). So many of my quizzes nowadays seem to end up as drag and drop matching. Does this show good practice or a lack of imagination?

Being Dyslexic

I added a link to Being Dyslexic to the Dyslexia Information Sites page yesterday. The site has been around for a few years and gets a lot of traffic. The site was set up by a dyslexic adult, it contains a vast amount of information and has a very active forums section. I do however have some reservations.

With so much information from so many sources, it is inevitable that some of it is conflicting. As a tutor working with dyslexic learners I am looking for clear information which is reliable, both for myself and to point others towards. Because the underlying cause of dyslexia is unclear, dyslexia is defined through its symptoms and diagnosis tends to be restrained, even tentative. Yet when I am working with someone who is dyslexic I have no doubts about it. When a learner displays a symptom I think (or say) that that is the dyslexia coming through. It is quite different from working with someone who is not dyslexic, although there is also a category of people who might be dyslexic.

Unfortunately one of the first statements I came across on the forums was that dyslexia is about difficulties with reading, writing and spelling and that is the sum of it. I have read this online in several places in the past few weeks. And it is a statement which I find very untrue. I would try to define dyslexia as being something which has a number of characteristic symptoms and these include difficulties with reading, writing and spelling. Other symptoms such as short term memory difficulties, difficulties processing sounds, organisational difficulties are just as significant, if not always so apparent, and are also used in diagnosis.

The reason I feel a need to bring this up again is that dyslexia remains a controversial subject and is liable to enquiry by the media. We have seen writers such as Julie Birchill and Peter Hutchins cause backlash and outrage in recent weeks, as elements of the media seek to undermine the legal right to recognition and support. What we need is clarity and discretion.

Pageflakes

Because Pageflakes has become so much part of my online life in the past six months, I've been looking for ways to share it. So I have made a sample page with some Skills for Life links and feeds on it and posted it here. It is very easy to sign up to and set up your own home page. I've quickly found I need a page at work, a page at home, etc. Luckily it's very easy to add new pages. I believe this page will get updated as I add things to it.

The Pageflakes team are also touting the collaborative side of pages. This means that a teacher can share a page with learners and have everybody accessing and selected learners, or all, making changes. It could therefore become a useful means of coordinating a set of blogs.

More Mental Maths Quizzes

The purpose of more mental maths quizzes (on the Maths Quizzes page) came about from the chilling understanding that my L2 numeracy students had forgotten the techniques they had learned to do 4 Basic Rules calculations. Some might say that it would not have made any difference if they had forgotten their tables and their written methods. However my learners are adamant that they cannot remember tables. Some of them have learned at least to recognise some tables over the course of this year. But the tricks and techniques have contributed more to confidence and, I believe, more to mathematical understanding. I have concentrated more on easier tasks this time.

Functional Skills

I had no sooner added a link to Totally Skilled's embedded learning models, for example in IT and Health, where the embedded skills are functional rather than basic, than I came across them in a meeting, where part of this document was circulated. It's a few months old, but I had never realised that functional skills were going to take over from Basic Skills and Key Skills. August 2012 is currently the final date for Skills for Life awards.

It will be interesting to see how the Core Curriculum fares in this brave new world.

New Links: City and Guilds Format End Tests

Maybe they've been there for ages, but I've only just discovered the links for City and Guild style end tests (linked on this page). At this time of the year especially, it is useful to be able to give people an idea of what the tests will actually look like when they are done on computers. We use City and Guilds, and it has often not been easy to show this to learners, as most of the samples are in a different format. The City and Guilds format can be confusing when first encountered - some dyslexic learners get confused with the way documents can be shown in a pop-up window, and some older monitors do not handle this very well. Practice helps.

Elearning for Literacy

Preparing staff training for Web 2.0 has of course made me think about the purpose of it all. Why use elearning? And in elearning why use Web 2.0? If you follow the arguments through, one of the strongest reasons given why elearning works and especially Web 2.0 works is that it passes control to the learner and takes control away from the teacher.

The elearning enthusiasts tell us that we must prepare for this change - we as teachers cannot stay in control of learning.

In literacy teaching I spent a lot of time in the nineties trying to give learners control of their own learning through an open learning centre, with written packs and elearning at its heart. A lot of that seems to have gone out of the window with the arrival of Skills for Life. We have the agenda of a national core curriculum, and achievement to be assessed against portfolios and tests aligned to that. We assess needs against the curriculum and code all activities to the curriculum in our lesson plans to meet quality requirements. Of course there is plenty of space to use Web 2.0 with this. However it is easy to see why busy tutors, who have received their training in this setup, let the needs of the curriculum drive the learning rather than the wants of the learner. Too many of us are happy to take our learning materials of a shelf or off a link on a website.

This thread of thought was inspired by a quote from David Warlick from here:

"We are a generation who was taught how to be taught — not how to teach ourselves."

Will Richardson refers to it in this blog entry, and Will's argument is just as relevant to Skills for Life as it is to school teaching in the UK or USA.

More on Blogs

Because I'm preparing a session on Web 2.0 tools for the college - not Skills for Life specific, blogs have come up a lot in the past week. I've put a new page on the website (linked off the teachers page to collect all the blog resources. This will allow me to structure the headings more usefully, and so organise the content by student or teacher, and by numeracy, dylexia and so on.

One of the new links was for Larry Ferlazzo's daily list of resources for ESOL/EFL. He is interested in Web 2.0 tools as well as traditional approaches and I haven't begun to explore it yet. I'm sure more links and thoughts will come in the next couple of weeks.

New Website Links 2 - Blogs

Blogging Resources: Minnesota and New York. I came across these two pages by chance. Although some of the listed blogs are a couple of years out of date, there is an interesting sample of some of the ways blogs could be used with learners:

1. Tutor writes blog on topic, and learners respond through comments anonymously, here; even better would be for the learners to add their names ("Ahmed wrote...".
2. Students respond through logged in names here.
   
3. Teacher (here) writes main blog, and adds links to students who write their own blog entries, example here, with teacher responding through comments.
4. Teacher and learners all on same blog (see Clan)

I will probably find more, but the links are a bit slow this afternoon. I'll get back. I think it is the flexibility of blogging as a writing tool that makes it so powerful, it's sequential, it's the comments, it's the feeds, it's the simplicity of the interface, it's the tags (labels), and so on.

New Website Links 1

Scientific Calculator: I know this isn't Numeracy, but every now and then I need one when working with a student, and this is such a beautiful tool. I found it as a new link on Maggie Harnew's site and so it gives me the opportunity to plug the Adult Basic Skills Resource Centre, which probably needs no introduction, as it must be the country's leading (the world's leading?) online depository of paper-based Skills for Life resources. Although my focus is very much Elearning, I need paper-based stuff and I like to dip in when my own resources don't cover what I'm looking for. I was however brought up in the old school: my literacy volunteer training in 1983 stressed strongly coming into every session with something specially made for each learner. You can't do that of course, but I like to have my own materials where I understand why they were designed in the way they were. I need to know that on, for instance, a maths sheet of sums or a spelling reinforcement that all the issues are covered and that there is a learning progression to be worked through.

New Website Quizzes

I've added a few Beauty Therapy quizzes linked from the Quizzes page.

As might be guessed I wrote them for a particular student who is struggling with remembering the names of muscles and arteries. I try all sorts of things, especially mnemonics, so I am trying Hot Potatoes quizzes with her to see if it works. She enjoys doing them, but she hasn't learned the words yet. If I have them on the web, I am acting in accordance with the software licence and will have them there the next time I need them. They may be useful for someone else. I get this quite a lot with students I support, where they are asked to remember wonderful, impossible names for a level 2 NVQ; another example is where Horticulture students have to learn the Latin names of plants. I did Latin so the names of these muscles mean a little bit to me. They don't mean much to my Somali student.

Blogs and Wikis for Literacy

These thoughts come from reading Doug Belshaw's blog here. This post led me to his class wiki, the class blog roll, and a discussion of how this works in practice. Reading all three in conjunction is fruitful.

I can certainly see a literacy class, where the class materials are on one page - a wiki, and where the student writing is on a set of others - blogs. Moodle certainly has the set up to do this, but the wiki approach is more straightforward and more easily customisable, and the learners might prefer to be in a more public (and more neutral) space. I'll have a go in Moodle and see if I can make it look right. The problem Doug Belshaw has is where to store the blogs, but with a smaller literacy class each student could have a Blogger account.

I also liked Doug's recent post on Hitting the Wall, talking about wanting innovate as with elearning but finding a brick wall - cue nice illustrations. This is just as relevant in FE as in Secondary School. He doesn't talk about demotivated (and confused) staff though, maybe that only happens in FE.

Reflect 7

There is a new issue of Reflect out in pdf, which I always enjoy reading. One article I found interesting, another I'm afraid to say rather made my blood boil.

Firstly, positively, I enjoyed the piece on Page 17 entitled Bilingual Learners - literacy or ESOL? It's about class placement, what is the boundary between an ESOL class and a literacy class. Examples are given of learners ending up in what purported to be literacy classes when their real need was oral English. At a few stages of my career I've had a hand in placing bilingual learners, and it's never been a problem, but then I've always known the content of the classes and the skills of the teachers. The examples given here could mostly have been put right if the learner's needs had been adequately assessed. I cannot say whether these learners were asked whether their main need was to improve speaking or literacy, but it looks as if they were placed to meet institutional needs, group everyone together because the institution cannot fund two different classes. There may also be issues with non-specialist referral staff who are confused by the presence of Speaking and Listening in the Literacy Curriculum. Working in Southall in West London in the 1980s, I was responsible for setting up specific ESOL/Literacy classes, for learners who had poorish oral skills but little or no first language literacy. These were taught by literacy specialists with an interest in or experience of ESOL. Currently colleges may run Basic Skills courses within their ESOL provision for this group of learners, mostly I believe taught by ESOL specialists. I have always been more than happy to place bilingual learners in literacy classes, but only if I am convinced that is what they need and want, and that the teacher can cope with it. The article also makes reference in passing to the idea that British born literacy learners may have ESOL needs as well. It is good to see that research is being done into the issue.

On a more negative mode I was less happy to see a plug for the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM), under the guise of a review. There is a link between NRDC who publish Reflect and NCETM via the DFES - too many acronyms. The NCETM site worries me a lot, maybe because it does not seem to have a lot to do with excellence, although it should be a portal to so much. Sure there are links to resources, but in the world of mathematics, there are hundreds of sites with links to resources, some with just as strong moderation. However the site (and the "review")sets great store in its blogging. I fail to see what they mean by the word "blog"; I think they are confusing "blog" with "blog post". It's not easy to follow one person's posts, and there are no RSS feeds for "blogs" that I can discover. The only two blog posts with reference to post 16 consist of a starter entry and a single comment (from the same user) that he'll digest and get back. The biggest problem with the site at present from my perspective is that it's all about schools. The "review" says that we as practitioners should contribute, but I cannot see why we should as there is no evidence that this is the right forum. It also adds that Maths4Life is getting involved so that may change things. Maybe I'll look again next year and it will be wonderful. Unfortunately the burden of an unintuitive site may prove too much. Surely Reflect should distance itself more from NRDC projects.

Enough rant, back to preparing next week's teaching.

Mind Maps

Here is a new Web 2.0 tool from Bubbl.us - quick and easy mind maps that you can edit collaboratively over the web. The product is at an early stage and there is not a lot of functionality, and maybe it will stay simple. As I see it you can only share to people you nominate as a friend with their email; you cannot post a link. You can however embed and I've put one below. I like to use mind maps to plan things with learners, especially dyslexic learners. I also use them to demonstrate things to be learned like this example. It's Flash based and takes time to load. It prints well, but really needs a colour printer. It's free of course and readily accessible.

Additions 9th March

I've added links for the following:

• I found a link to dyslexics.org on a blog I have been following - I Speak of Dreams, particularly the post on Theories on the Cause of Dyslexia. Both writers are what I would call sober on dyslexia; they are concerned that dyslexia should be understood in a way that includes a scientific understanding. Theories on the Cause of Dyslexia refers to the idea that we can expect that more than one cause of dyslexia will prove to be the case when we have full understanding. This page on dyslexics.org refers to the myths of dyslexia and suggests that a lot of the problems that dyslexic people have are caused by bad teaching early on - this in a week when inspectors have criticized literacy standards in nursery education. A lot of misunderstanding is caused by focusing so much on the idea that dyslexia is poor reading skills, rather than that poor reading skills is one symptom of dyslexia, exacerbated in countries with difficult spelling patterns.

• I have started to put resources I use to teach what I call underpinning numeracy skills for people to learn in preparation for the end tests in to one place. At the moment this is on a wiki page which I can update easily wherever I am. Eventually I will incorporate it on the site along with the Spellsheets page and other similar sets. At the moment it mainly includes my own resources (quizzes and pdfs) and stuff from Skillswise. Although the site is mainly about online learning, there are some points where I need to organise paper-based resources as well. At the moment this is linked from the End Tests page.

• I have gone over the word lists in the spellsheets and changed fonts into sans serif ones for easier reading with my learners.
  

Dyslexia Scotland

On the Friday I added a link to Dyslexia Scotland to the Dyslexia Information page. What impressed me most is that it's a beautifully designed site. It contains all the usual dyslexia information with all the Scotland specific information you would expect. It incorporates the Textic toolbar so cleanly it seems part of the design - it probably was. The links to Readspeaker are very clear. The whole design has been worked out wonderfully. The British Dyslexia Association site also uses Textic and also has the Textic talk toolbar for sound, but inevitably they could not redesign the site to incorporate these.

I played around with the Textic bar when it first came out, but rarely had the opportunity to use it with dyslexic learners. It's a great idea and I would recommend dyslexic people to pay for the Word bar. I'm not so sure about the Internet Explorer bar - I mostly abandoned Internet Explorer about a year ago, and they do not yet have a bar for Firefox. I don't know if anyone has gone for a whole college approach to Textic - I imagine the limitations and costs would be complex. The website way can be effective. With public websites having to make themselves accessible under the DDA, there is a lot of scope for clean design and tools like this to help poor readers.

I also played around with text and background colours a few years ago on this page. I try to do handouts on coloured pages and use sans serif fonts like Arial and Verdana, but I'm not a great fan of Comic Sans (not available on this blog). I've tried Arial and Verdana on this post as well

Website Additions 20 February 2007

I have added links today for Maths Activities for some of the Canterbury Cross programs. I have a couple of quite strong reservations:

• they are .exe files and may cause difficulties when they are clicked on some set-ups. Firefox also handles .exe files in a more cumbersome (but perhaps more secure) way.
• they can be quite large programs with and the bit with what I see as real Adult Numeracy relevance may not come up first.

However the value of these activities may be quite high. There is a similar issue with the Gordons files which are flash based but which may reference a number of different skills within one file. I haven't added many of these yet.

I have also started a section on the Elearning page for what is at the moment Blogs, wikis and podcasts. I hope in time that this will become a whole section/page on Web 2.0 approaches for Skills for Life. At the moment there isn't much. I have added the Grammar Girl podcasting site - it is likely to be of more value for teachers than learners; but it demonstrates a great use of the technology. I'd be interested to hear how learners like the change to a listening style. The blogs show that blogs can be used in a number of different ways.

Literacy and Web 2.0

Seeing this video on YouTube yesterday started me thinking, as I am sure it has for many people (400,000 hits in 9 days). It sums up in 5 minutes how Web 2.0 is changing our culture, no less.

My thoughts are about literacy and the requirements for it. It is rapidly becoming essential to read the web and to write to the web, to remain included in society; the video shows just how. As ICT becomes increasingly seen as a Skill for Life, we need to make sure that our learners can access the web both ways. They must be able to read web pages and to recognize and understand hyperlinks. They must be able to write to web packages like blogs, wikis, Moodle, web forums and all the others, using the sort of post editor that I am using here, using the icons and conventions that they would use in a word processor

So along with using Web 2.0 technologies as learning tools, we must ensure that our learners, particularly those returning to learning, have the skills to access them. Of course our teachers also have to have those skills.

I had a look at the Level 1 Adult ICT Skills standards from the QCA, published 2005. The internet is still passive, for reading and downloading. I dare say someone learning Web 2.0 skills could be accredited using these standards, but it shows how fast we are moving.

New Additions to Website

I've added a couple of links for podcasted listening materials, Breaking News and Podcards. Both have mp3 listening with worksheets and transcripts, so you can use them for reading as well as listening. It would be nice to think in this mp3 oriented world that someone would produce some listening materials tied in to the Literacy Core Curriculum and made freely available.

I also like the class Mnemonics Sheet from Stella Jales at Wiltshire College, hosted by Maggie Harnew on her excellent Resource Centre. I have a few collected on Topics on the CCM site. I use them regularly in my teaching and new ideas are welcome. I don't usually link paper-based resources, but Topics lists a few that are available over the web.

The Canterbury Cross numeracy programs are executable files (.exe) so they may create some difficulties to run on some networks. I find they run straight off the links in IE6, but not in Firefox 2.0, and they may come in useful. Area is Level 2, while Fractions has a nice game for percentage quantities of money, and Round It is Level 1. I'll need to look right through them and see if I can make direct links for the activities page; it depends on what the issue is with Firefox.

Website - GCSE Maths Help

I've added a link to Keith Burnett's GCSE Maths help, which I should have linked before but neglected to. Keith's podcasts and videos are of interest, and one or two have direct relevance to numeracy teaching:

• podcast on ratio
• video link on averages (Level 2)

YouTube does have one or two other videos of relevance, and certainly there is a lot of potential here. I need to find a way of putting these sorts of link on a page. They are not interactive, of course, but they will create interest and offer varied learning styles.