Adult Curriculum Changes

I noticed that the new Interactive Core Curriculum Tool on the Excellence Gateway website contains updated versions of the various curricula, in response to the consultation exercise of past year or so. There is no significant change as far as I can see to the Pre-Entry Curriculum itself and little to the ESOL one, bar distinguishing the elements better between beginners with no literacy and those with already know other scripts. (You may have to register before seeing any of this online. And I don't know if these documents are now "official.")

The numeracy curriculum does have a number of minor changes to sort out some of the discrepancies which have confused us over the years. This means I can now code my lesson plans correctly, for example, when teaching someone mental methods of calculation. A few things have been added to Entry 3. I like particularly this statement "Expressing one number as a fraction of another number has been included at Level 1 since this is a skill which is often tested at this level." So now I know: it's the testing which drives the curriculum, not the other way round; I've always had to teach it, of course, because it is tested.

There seem to be fewer changes in the literacy curriculum, but one is intriguing. They have moved "understand when commas are needed in sentences........ and that commas should not be used in place of full stops" from Level 2 to Entry 3. I'll be amazed if tutors can really get this working, as I find that a lot of my learners working towards Level 1 find commas really difficult, particularly the sentences bit. If people are going to be tested on this seriously at Entry 3, I'd stick my neck out and say there are going to be difficulties.

Otherwise the online implementation of the curricula is pretty good, and easy to find your way around when you get used to the layout - same as on any sophisticated site. The activities and ideas can be downloaded, or are linked to other places. You can add your own suggested activities for anyone else to see, and save places you want to return to frequently. There are also numerous forums on the Excellence Gateway site and Collaboration Spaces, including this forum for the Curriculum. Unfortunately most of these are pretty inactive. I'll be interested to see if any of the interactive side of this "tool" gets used more than other similar areas for Skills for Life or FE in the UK.

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.

7 times 13 is 28

I guess many people may have seen this. I'm sure it could have a place in a numeracy class, and I'm quite enjoying thinking of the ways that might work: Why can't it work? Why is the answer not sensible? Estimate what a sensible answer might be. Let's compare it with the ways we have discussed doing these things. Is it right to check the answer? How does place value fit in? There's a lot you can do with it.

I used to hate Abbott and Costello when I was a teenager and they were all over TV and film shows. However I find this convincing and their timing is great.

You can find the video here at Teacher Tube, and you may find the comments helpful. There's another similar clip here.

New Numeracy Quizzes

I've started adding some new quizzes to the Maths Quizzes page on the Skills for Life Website, and to Maths Activities. I've found I've needed some extra teaching materials for learners who are supposed to be working towards Level 1, but have real weaknesses with things like subtraction, tables and division. In an ideal world they'd work towards an E3 end test, but some are already at E3 in Initial Assessment.

I'm reflecting on why I've not felt a need to have these before. I suppose it's because I'm not able to work with these learners one to one this year and therefore cannot work with examples I hand-write off the cuff as the need presents itself. The published stuff is not much help: Maths the Basic Skills covers most of this need but progresses too quickly, Carol Roberts' Level 1 Numeracy assumes they've all got E3 well sorted and the examples are much too hard, and Skillswise also mixes harder examples on the same sheets, and the E3 part is not comprehensive enough. These learners, who frequently express that they do not like maths, quickly get too discouraged when they cannot do things.

Another direct issue is that multiplying and dividing by 10 and 100 does not enter into the curriculum until L1 (N1/L14 and N2/L1.6) , and you really have to be able to multiply and divide by 1000 as well in order to convert units in the same system (MSS1/L1.7). This makes the step up to L1 from E3 quite severe. Yet this skill underpins a lot else of Level 1.

Dyscalculia Research

There was a report a couple of weeks ago (the NCETM report links other reports) that research shows that dyscalculia may be more common in schoolchildren than dyslexia. This is quite a revolutionary idea. If it is true, and people take up on it, we can expect big changes in the way that maths is taught.

First however some background. The research was carried out on 1500 primary schoolchildren in Cuba and shows that between 3 and 6 percent screened positive, as opposed to "the 2.5 to 4.3 percent who have dyslexia." I think these are dyslexia in the UK figures. The research used a screener devised by Brian Butterworth - more information about him here, and details of his published screener here. Brian Butterworth is evidently one of our leading experts on the subject, and the screener is meticulous in its definition of dyscalculia and in its efforts to exclude other causes for maths deficit. The screener is only normed up to the age of 14 and it is only a screener and exhorts its users to look at other causes before making a diagnosis.

The reports of the research do raise a lot of questions. Why Cuba? Were the schoolchildren also screened for dyslexia? (If not, the comparison with dyslexia is far from convincing.) Did the researchers look for other contributing causes? Was the screener similar to the published one?

I've always thought of dyscalculia as a comparatively rare condition, relating to difficulty with conceptualising numerical information. I've met a few, but only a few, people like that in my years of teaching. What I don't think it is includes:

• disliking maths
• not understanding maths after bad teaching
• dyslexia - a lot of dyslexics have difficulty with maths
• memory difficulties - cannot hold how to do things

You'd want to filter these things out, especially the dyslexia. Someone who cannot learn tables, or gets confused between multiplication and division, or tries to take the top number from the bottom one in a written sum, or confuses median and mean, and so on, most likely does not have dyscalculia.

Of course if the research proves to be true I may need to change my opinion. But I may find that all that has happened is that the definition of dyscalculia has changed.

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.

New Activities on Website

I've written a couple of quizzes for Level 1 students working towards the End Test (Grammar). I've had a few people recently doing practice tests asking me what "grammatical" means, so the quizzes are there to give practice after the explanations have been given. I may also add the PowerPoint I've used to help in the teaching, though I've not posted this sort of resource before. I found the quizzes quite difficult, partly because the practice tests cover the issue in a number of different ways, but also because I am not at all sure how it is presented in current real tests. The quizzes may then get altered with more experience.

I also like the Handling Data resources from the Gold Dust Resources from the QIA. The for Interactive Activities were written for tutors learning but are great for some Level 2 learners. I like the way they show all 4 averages together subject to change as data changes. It is such an easy idea but I don't recall seeing it before. Many learners, especially the dyslexic ones, find remembering which average is which confusing, so a new resource is very welcome. This one shows it clearly, and you can hide the bar chart and frequency table if they interfere.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.
  

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.

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.

New Additions to Skills for Life Website

I have added a small raft (7) of mental maths quizzes to Activities Maths, covering some techniques for larger numbers, ie not simple bonds and tables. They were done for a couple of my students and went down well. I have tried in some of them to make them not just sums - so fractions involves divisions and area involves multiplying.

I like the way a matching exercise works. It's a bit like a puzzle and the learner gets satisfaction on completing it. It also has some of the same benefits as multiple choice - the learner can do the calculation and then compare it with possible answers. In this way it gives good practice for multiple choice.

I've added a link for the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics to Background. It's not really got anything yet for post 16 numeracy. There are a couple of relevant blogs, Fractious Fractions and SfL/KS/FS in FE, but at the moment they look more like the start of a discussion board than a blog. Some of the more general or school blogs are more interesting and read like blogs, such as John Dabell's entry here.

Numeracy Teaching

I saw a presentation on Thursday which included a section which showed written mistakes that a dyslexic student might make doing written calculations.

I was struck by how rarely I come across people doing sums like this on paper. My current role includes supporting apprentices to pass Level 1 or Level 2 tests. I can only think of two of those students who regularly did calculations on paper, and one of those was one of the few dyscalculics (does that word exist?) I have come across, and he could not hold a sum in his head. Of the others, few have wanted to do calculations on paper and they have been relieved when I started to offer them alternative strategies.

Being a good FE teacher I write learning plans and lesson plans and try to code these to the Core Curriculum. Normally I support the Core Curriculum, though I strongly believe we should teach other things as well. But it is not easy to code mental arithmetic to the curriculum. There is however a whole section at the level I usually teach (N1/L1.3) about written methods. Luckily my students do not have to demonstrate that they can use efficient written methods. And why should they have to? Numeracy is about everyday maths in practical situations - the only real world place you will be presented with a sum is in a maths class.

Most maths books, maths websites, maths worksheets, numeracy worksheets, etc, etc, demonstrate numeracy skills by written methods, which renders most of them useless for teaching purposes, although they may have useful practice questions. Even the wonderful Maths the Basic Skills Curriculum Edition does this. An honourable exception is Skillswise which has good sections on mental maths.