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.