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.

Literacy Blogs

I've been reviewing the current state of literacy blogs, after 18 months of writing this. I haven't found a lot to add to previous findings but it is all listed on the blog page. It is good to report that blogs are being written at all and read of course. There is a cluster of blogs in Canada, a couple in the US and one or two others. There remains only one significant current blog for literacy writers, but I kid myself that there are others which are not publicly listed. Bloggers come in all shapes and sizes and I enjoy reading personal tales as well as posts focusing on being a teacher.

Readers not familiar with the format of blogging will benefit from subscribing to RSS feeds and displaying these. There are a number of different ways of doing this. I like the look and feel of Google Reader and this is usually reviewed well. For myself I use Pageflakes and would find life online difficult without that application. I have put some of these current literacy blogs on the published Skills for Life Pageflakes page I have made, so anyone interested can see how easy it is to scan RSS feeds.

There are a lot more ESOL blogs and many of these are of interest. Over the next couple of weeks I will sort and consider these.

Speaking and Listening Page

I've added a Speaking and Listening Page to the Skills for Life Website.

This is not quite like an "activities" page, because it does not necessarily go directly to online activities. It has come about because I increasingly work with learners needing to improve speaking and listening skills while being supported and with tutors providing this support. There are quite a few relevant audio files published or activities containing audio to listen to, but they are not very easy to organise while planning. So I have linked all the component parts of the excellent Skillswise resources for a start. I am also listing relevant units from the published DFES packs and from the newer NLN resources. I cannot link to the NLN resources outside of college because of copyright, although I can put links on our Moodle site. The DFES ESOL packs have good resources which can be run as as Moodle courses from Moodle to Go, and this works smoothly. It would be nice to have the same facility for the Literacy packs, but the CDs provided can be ripped to Windows Media Player or similar and preferably labelled for easy reference.

I wonder how much these Literacy audio files get used. As a literacy tutor I have always put the emphasis on reading and writing skills, but the needs in support are different. Learners have very different support needs and may be receiving support for literacy or for language. I have found the process of sorting out suitable learning materials difficult, and I hope that by listing everything on one page it will make the process of planning a bit easier for me and for others.

Seeing Yourself in Print - Reflect 10

Reflect 10 is out in print and pdf download from the NRDC but not yet online.

There's a piece on elearning for ESOL which covers a number of applications, including blogs and captioned pictureshows, but does not go into much how to do it detail. The ideas would have application usually for literacy as well, though I suspect some tutors would ask for advice on how to fit the idea into the curriculum.

Seeing Yourself in Print is a nice piece about publishing learners' writing from the past (Write First Time and Gatehouse) to current initiatives such as NRDC's own Voices on the Page. The authors stress the confidence coming from seeing your writing in print.

Elearning tutors may help by allowing learners to see their writing in virtual print (online) as well, through things like Skillswise's Your Stories and blogs in general. The Skills for Life website started with a magazine, which the learners liked to show family and friends, and that certainly contributed to confidence.

When I worked in Adult Education as a literacy tutor in the 80s, I ran a poetry class in the evenings for any Basic Education students who wanted to do something in May and June after the year's classes had ended. The real confidence came from the writing itself. We were able to put the emphasis on expression and technique rather than on correcting and producing acceptable English, and the learners found this liberating. And, yes, they did take pride in seeing their names in the magazine, produced with a BBC B and a dot matrix printer.

E-Book on Literacy and Dyslexia

Hugo Kerr’s highly recommended chapter on dyslexia from “The Cognitive Psychology of Literacy Teaching: Reading, Writing, Spelling, Dyslexia (& a bit more besides)” brings me back to the ongoing debate, at least in my mind, about the “reality” of dyslexia.

Hugo is truly sceptical about dyslexia, without going quite as far as to suggest that it doesn’t exist. I might have agreed more fully a few years ago, though I would never have read the amazing quantity of literature quoted, which covers the field. In those days I really was more anti-dyslexia, I believed that it didn't matter to the way I delivered my teaching; I wondered about trying to put those views into order. Looking back now, I remember a few people in particular who came to me for help with spelling, but their needs were great and they never seemed to make as much progress as others.

Now I feel I am more of a believer. I have written in this blog before here and here ideas around the definition of dyslexia. From Hugo’s quoted definitions I am probably closest to the Moray House definition; I certainly do not like the idea of the primacy of reading or literacy difficulty.

I wonder about the other, perhaps secondary, “symptoms” of dyslexia, which include:

• Memory difficulties
• Organisational difficulties
• Difficulties listening to two people at once
• Mis-saying words
• Difficulties with maps
• Difficulties with maths

I wonder about the idea, in Cynthia Klein for one, of difficulties with different sorts of processing, motor, auditory and visual, and the different sorts of literacy problems consequent; I have done these analyses and find them useful.

I wonder about the continuum, about dyspraxia and dyscalculia.

I wonder above all about all those people I have worked with who find great relief in the diagnosis of dyslexia; once it is accepted, there can be release from the anxieties remaining from school and there can be a new addressing of current priorities. As a support tutor I can move away if desired from teaching spelling to supporting writing and expression.

In the UK the diagnosis of dyslexia is crude and unsatisfying, and open to abuse. However it is very often needed for funding to ensure support, and therefore necessary.

I found the book from Maggie Harnew's site, as so often. I'll read more of it, when I can find when I get used to the idea of an e-book - I don't find it easy on a landscape monitor.

Read The Words

I've added a link to Read the Words to the Dyslexia Resources page on the Skills for Life Website. I know that dyslexic people sometimes use or are recommended software to turn text into speech. This is a free version and might be attractive if you don't want to use it a lot. I find the slurs between words difficult sometimes, but a dyslexic student pointed out that you have to learn to use software like this so that you become used to its peculiarities; I don't need to use it so I am not a good judge. Just don't try to read a web page from the url; cut and paste the text instead. I can see how this could be a really useful tool.

Another purpose of the site is to embed speech on your web page, so here goes.


It sounds pretty good to me, though I did have to switch to Internet Explorer to get the embedding to work.

Video Jug Punctuation

I found the videos on videojug for punctuation interesting. The explanation is very straightforward and rapid, but as it's a video a teacher could keep pausing and starting again. A teacher might even find it easier to find out about punctuation from this than a book, as it is so straightforward. I like the easy English accent; there is a comment complaining about the voice over's mispronunciation of "haitch", but actually I like it as it is the way that most teachers and learners in my institution talk. The content makes it mostly Level 2 however.

I wonder how much teachers will actually use little bits of video like this. You'd need to be confident and well-equipped to switch a little bit of video in, because you don't want to make a big thing of it - it's just an alternative way of presenting learning. However, I can see from my teaching and that of my colleagues that video is becoming more and more important.

I'm working on creating videos at college for use in supporting in mainstream, and that is creating interest. I seem to be adding video links regularly, but this is the first time I've added something to the interactive activities pages.