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.

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.

ESOL Grammar Activities

I've added a new page for ESOL Grammar Activities to the Skills for Life website. Like the other activities pages, this contains direct link both to our quizzes and to quizzes on other people's websites.

This change reflects a change in some of my teaching this year. I am supporting a number of learners who don't speak English natively and I want to address some of their difficulties with grammar. In analysing their difficulties in initial assessment, there were a number of common factors: endings to words (both nouns and verbs), articles (or, more correctly, determiners), prepositions and conjunctions. Of course the internet is alive with quizzes and other activities for grammar for English learners, but I've not previously found them greatly useful for this group of learners. Some of these people may have been to school in the UK for at least some of the time, some may not be literate in their first language, some may not have been to ESOL classes. Moreover the mistakes are presented in English literacy, for me in their main courses, and so perhaps a literacy approach rather than an ESOL approach is needed.

The most acute difficulty is with the endings for tenses and plural nouns. I certainly don't want to teach tenses in a formal way, but I do want to help them recognise and correct their errors. So I have started writing some quizzes for endings. It has been hard work writing even a few. I have also found a few relevant quizzes for the other topics on other sites. I have used these activities for explanation as I go along, rather than for reinforcement which is how I usually use quizzes. So far the feedback from students has been very positive. I hope the page will develop in the coming months.

ESOL Scotland and Teachers TV

Both these sites have something of interest.

The ESOL Scotland site is a new site, so the potential is not clear yet. It's a general portal site for Scotland. It does have now a raft of usable learning resources, many of which will be useful for literacy and those in .doc format will be easy to adapt. There are also some listening resources which may be useful in Literacy or ESOL Support.

I'd been aware of the Teachers TV site, linked to the digital TV channel. I hadn't noticed that there was a section with Skills for Life Videos for 14 to 19 year olds in the FE section. I immediately found these useful; maybe it's very much my job, but I work with apprentices in Social Care and in Hairdressing, and these videos will appeal to my learners. They demonstrate Skills for Life (Key Skills really) in practical situations, which are realistic and relevant. They are also well made. I've been looking for videos recently with a view to using them with quizzes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Maths Quizzes - New Additions

I added a new Maths quiz on Currency Conversion to the site at the end of last week. There is a wealth of activities for maths out there. I have come across many at several sites in the last couple of months and have added some of their goodies to Activities Maths. They are mostly Flash-based, look good and work well. There are many more useful activities around for numeracy than for literacy. Some of the reasons for this include: schools activities are often created in a neutral way which will appeal to adults, the schools curriculum is much closer to the adult curriculum for numeracy than for literacy, and the issues are more similar; activities are often created to work on interactive whiteboards and so look good and simple on the screen; many literacy activities I've come across are from an EFL background or a University Study Skills background - there are useful activities in the NLN materials (needs registration - look under Family Care etc), but I cannot link these.

However I still find it useful to write Hot Potatoes quizzes for numeracy. I was brought up in the old-fashioned basic skills way where it was an ideal to bring in something individual for your learners each session. A Hot Potatoes quiz is generally only a worksheet online with online rather than verbal feedback, but it feels completely different for both tutor and learner; the learner feels more involved while the tutor can be more neutral, not having to correct it. Drag and drop can add quite a lot extra, but I've not been able to persuade the Hot Potatoes team of this. For this week's quiz on Currency Conversion I had something particular in mind as well as currency conversion, which was multiplying by halves, 6 x 2.5, etc. Things like this rarely crop up in generic flash activities which look at one element only, and are not often concerned to teach things which people find difficult, the core task of a Skills for Life tutor.

I work with a number of learners moving from E3 numeracy to Level 2 numeracy, and there are always issues with fractions. I know that any worksheets or quizzes I write on this topic will always be useful for next year's learners.

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.

New Additions - Spelling

I have added a page which links some of the Spelling Quizzes to other resources, mainly pdf word lists at the moment. This reflects the way I have been teaching spelling over the past few years, both with groups and with one to one support. I use a word list to look at particular rules or patterns, have the learners write sentences using the words and use the quizzes to reinforce the learning at the end. Normally I'd do one rule a week and have tried to indicate how I would organize this with the numbers down the left. Some learners will go more slowly. I'd often back it up with individual look/cover/say programmes. You can compare this with the LEAP programme in Jenny Lee's "Making the Curriculum Work for Learners with Dyslexia", published by the Basic Skills Agency, details here. I came across this more recently. There are also references to LEAP deep in the DFES Framework for Understanding Dyslexia.


I have also posted an L2 spelling quiz, which is longer and gives more feed-back than usual. This was designed as a task sheet with oral feedback for a particular group of Level 2 candidates, doing the test with minimum of input. I have added the feedback to the quiz, but am unsure how this will go down with a range of learners aiming at the Level 2 end tests.

Recent Additions

I have enjoyed finding useful resources on public Scottish sites recently. Two good examples are a store of worksheets and website links on Adult Literacies Online which is a little like the resources part of Talent. Sites like these are not necessarily easy to find what you are looking for, as either you go through sequentially - and the Scottish site is already up to 156 items since June - or you search which can be difficult if you don't know what you are looking for. Easy to organise from the point of view of website design though. On Talent you can search by curriculum reference.

The Learning and Teaching Scotland Core Skills site has some useful numeracy activities. I particularly liked 10% and similar which would be good for one to one, or self-study, or on a whiteboard. I found it difficult to align these activities with English and Welsh Curriculum or Key Skills levels and references. I understand that Scottish tutors have difficulty with our references, as in this guide (pdf: page 6) from CLAN. I have tried to avoid classifying resources on Activities English and Activities Maths completely by curriculum reference, but as the number of links grows it gets harder to find what you are looking for.