Maths Activities

Two websites with good ICT resources for Numeracy have recently been overhauled.

Firstly, the American NCTM has revamped its Java-based Illumination activities. I have added a few to the Activities Maths page, and will consider some more. I particularly like the Pan Balance Numbers activity, which I should imagine will appeal to those who appreciate Thinking Through Mathematics. The instructions for these activities are useful and directly accessible.

Secondly, The Standards Site, now called the National Strategies, has good demonstrations for mathematical concepts which I have long linked in Activities Maths. These are now more clearly accessed from the home site here. The mode of access has changed slightly so that the activities and the important instructions can be downloaded and run immediately. The host page also lists Interactive Whiteboard suitable files for Excel, and for Smart and Promethean Boards. I will also search through these for other activities useful for Post 16 Numeracy.

BBC RAW

I've added links for the newly enhanced BBC RAW site. The current content is not particularly about literacy or numeracy; rather it is about basic computing and financial literacy. However, these are two topics that are never very far away from the literacy and numeracy classroom, even if they do not feature high on the Skills for Life curriculum. There is certainly some direct literacy and numeracy in there - I've noticed a module on percentages. I can see many Skills for Life learners being motivated by these activities.

What I think is really stunning is the look of the site. It has a very clean and simple interface for a start, and the learning is nicely chunked. But it is the use of the presenters on the periphery of the screen with video or activity in the centre which seems innovative to me. I haven't looked at every BBC site, but this does seem to be a departure. It gives me an inkling of how TV and web content might come together some time in the future.

More content is promised over the next three years. I hope there will be something soon that is more directly "reading and writing." Mean time enjoy what is there now.

Online Dictionaries

I've come across a number of visual dictionaries recently, so I thought it was a good time to review the dictionaries section on the Skills for Life website. It's not a section I've changed much over the years, and it's been eight years now that the website has been around. It's not surprising that new applications are coming along as a result of developing web technologies.

Dictionaries now can have speech or synthesised speech rather the traditional phonetic equivalent which is difficult for learners, especially literacy learners. Look at the Dictionary.com site which aggregates different dictionaries' definitions. But now people are thinking of different ways of introducing a visual element. Examples include Picture That which uses pictures and sounds and uses a phonic approach designed for dyslexic learners - the site needs registration. Merriam-Webster's visual dictionary takes an encyclopedia-like approach with graphics and labels. Visuwords uses mind maps to make links between words. The site I have come across most recently, Shahi, links a wordbank and definitions with pictures tagged that way in Flickr. It's a beautifully simple "mashup", still at quite an early stage, but crying out to be used in literacy or ESOL classes by teachers with ideas.

It's a while since I taught much literacy to classes. The Wordsmyth dictionary was around then and I designed learning activities using it. I wonder how much online dictionaries are used now. We still need to teach our learners alphabetical order and how to find words in book dictionaries. We still need to teach our learners to use spell checks effectively. These new multi-sensory tools give us a number of interesting new options.

Stick With It and ICT

A link to a new practitioners' guide "Using ICT to help Skills for Life learners Stick with it!" arrived in my in-box this morning. This derives from research undertaken during the Stick With It project, undertaken by NRDC, NIACE and Tribal/CTAD, which looks at "persistence" of Skills for Life learners, ie what helps them stick at learning. The guide is published by the QIA.

At first glance it is good to have a document which outlines all sorts of uses of ICT in Basic Education, which is well produced and laid out, which is glossy and freely available. However reading it this morning has brought out a whole lot of long-standing frustrations.

Firstly the only research quoted is the one which shows that among 34 year olds those with Entry Level literacy and numeracy are disadvantaged digitally by being the group most likely not to have a computer at home. The relevance of ICT to persistence is basically treated as self-evident. Maybe something more enlightening will come up further down the research.

The guide certainly gives lots of examples of using ICT. The categories are, in the order of presentation: photos, videos, audio, text (word-processing, presentations, etc), User-generated content (basically Web 2.0), mobile learning, and information management (webquests etc). Each section has ideas for beginners and more confident users and lists benefits and pitfalls. However I suspect that most beginners ideas will be far beyond the confidence of many literacy and numeracy tutors; the first suggestion in the document is to use a digital camera to record learner achievement. Even the order of presentation is a bit daunting.

Having a class blog is suggested first for beginners under User-generated content. Unfortunately this is the one area where there are more pitfalls than benefits listed, with the authors getting serious about online identities and linking up with undesirables.

My main issues are:

• There is no mention of using computer assisted learning, interactive worksheets and so on. I still feel this is the main way forward to help people move away from the world of printed worksheets.
• There is no effort to link things to the curriculum which so dominates the teaching of professionals in this country, and few if any examples of good uses for numeracy.
• It would be nice to know how disadvantaged Skills for Life tutors are in theirICT skills, because I find that barriers start with tutors who know little beyond Word and email, and perhaps Google. Google is often the main way to find a site on the internet, even a site which is used regularly, even the main college website.

I could go on.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Google Docs in the Literacy Class

While blogs and wikis are something I can look forward to using with learners, and they are integral to Moodle, another possibility is Google Docs - in particular the word-processing part. Here is something I have run up as a first example to give some idea of what I have in mind. The linked example has the comments as part of the document, but if you publish it normally you would not have the comments embedded.

The Google Doc is basically an online interactive worksheet. You can put comments on them and all changes get displayed in real time. This example has a number of learners working on the same topic. However it could equally well be an individual doc for an individual learner.

Time Line

I've been thinking about changes I've seen in using computers for teaching Basic Skills in the past 20 or so years. The starting point came in a presentation I gave in Sheffield a couple of years ago.

• 1984-5 Community Drop-in - using BBC for word-processing, programs
• 1985-9 Community Classes - carrying BBC Masters in my car for word-processing, programs
• 1989-96 Open Learning Centre - suite of PCs (Amstrads) - used for word-processing (Wordstar), Lotus, authoring programs especially Storyboard
  
• 1990 - Laser Printer to replace dot-matrix to print learning materials
• 1990 - First "laptop"
  
• 1993 - Multimedia CD-ROMs
• c1995 - First contact with internet
• 1996/7 - Heard presentations from computer gurus about how internet would change everything
• 2000 - First used internet with students
• 2001 - started writing quizzes
• 2004 - started to collect interactive activities
• 2006 - quizzes and interactive activities still what I mainly use in 1-1; I know I'd be using different strategies in a classroom

Most of these moments seemed very exciting at the time. Taking the BBCs to community classes was very rewarding because the students were very interested and gained hugely in confidence, even if the equipment was heavy and parking sometimes difficult. The first laser printer was also great because it allowed us to make professional looking learning materials. We used Ventura which had GEM, a better than Windows 2 GUI. The printer cost over £1000 and was only the second in the college - that felt cutting edge (an unusual feeling in Basic Skills).

The Literacy Class of the Future

I have recently read 2 interesting schools based wikis (here and here), used to collaborate between schools in different continents. I certainly see blogs and wikis as being central to the literacy class of the future, in the same way as Interactive Whiteboards are central to the numeracy classroom of the present - aren't they? Learners can write to blogs individually and they can collaborate on creating a group wiki on subject or subjects of mutual interest. I've already commented (Reflect) on the use of Wikipedia in a literacy class. I used to publish student writing but Web 2.0 tools make it a lot easier and a lot more learner controlled.

I have added some blogs to the Using ILT page, but a major rework will have to wait. I am still trying to progress my Web2.0 skills. I've been further working with del.cicio.us: (these are my elearning bookmarks I enjoyed the del.icio.us tutorial from John Pederson, and have browsed other people's bookmarks. The tutorial seems to be a Google Doc, another nice Web2.0 tool which would be good in a literacy class of the future.

I have Pageflakes as a homepage, which I can use anywhere, on any browser, complete with well presented RSS feeds, including del.icio.us, including an elearning stream, and Flickr pictures I have rather dully uploaded. I have tried Flock (a Mozilla browser which has a front end for Flicklrand Myspace) and Elgg.

Reflect

I was interested to see in the new issue of Reflect from NRDC, under the heading Effective Practice:

Our analysis pointed to four guiding principles for ILT in a Skills for Life context:
1. Foster learner autonomy.
2. Enhance peer collaboration.
3. Plan the construction of artefacts.
4. Aim for technological diversity.

We also identified two strategies that do not appear to work:
1. Telling learners how to do the task rather than listen, discuss, prompt and extend.
2. Tutors using PowerPoint.

Although the research was done 2 years ago, and activities observed were things such as webquests and mindmaps (Web 1.0), the conclusions (autonomy, collaboration, doing) are more Web 2.0. A report and practitioner guide will follow. I hope the guide will include Web 2.0 ideas: blogs, forums, etc., as they should enable those guiding principles. It will be interesting to read the research which led to these conclusions.

There was also a review about using Wikipedia, with some ideas and starting links. It might also be useful to think of Simple Wikipedia, maybe to use in tandem. This has the benefit of using easy English. It might be easier also for groups to edit or add pages. Wikis are also also Web 2.0, the web as a place where people are writing information as well as reading it.

I always enjoy reading Reflect. This is Issue 6, available only in pdf at the moment. Earlier issues in html are here.

elearning

My head is full of ideas about elearning at the moment. The growth of the internet gets faster and faster as seers have always predicted. I got into this by looking at lots of the sites which are really blogs, such as Jane Knight's Jane's Link of the Day, Will Richardson's Weblogg-ed and Tony Karrer's eLearning Technology.

Will writes an education blog and most of his ideas and enthusiasms are practical and classroom related. Jane and Tony both come from a business perspective. Jane regularly has items of interest in her daily pick - I enjoyed Cappuccino U last week for instance. Hers is a good starting point. Tony has a very clear way of writing his blog, simple but inspiring.

I was very taken with the idea from Will, picked up on (here) that teachers must be users. I have widened the range of Web 2, collaborative, things I have been doing on the web, because this is where a big part of the future of elearning must be. As well as blogging, I have been using Moodle, to which my college is migrating from Blackboard, a great step forward if teachers can grasp the opportunities for collaborative learning it offers. I have been using RSS feeds, and would like to add one to the What's New page. I have been playing with del.icio.us and browsing Utube, Myspace and Flickr.

Some of this must get reflected in posted links. I am trying to rejig the ILT page but haven't found the formula yet.

I am finding it hard to punctuate elearning properly: it could be e-learning, elearning, eLearning, Elearning and others.