Live Worksheets, a Cool New Tool

Thank you, Christine, for telling us about liveworksheets.com. I cannot believe how quick and easy it was for me to open an account and create my first worksheet, then try it as a student. Wow.

Victor Gayol is the creator and site administrator. Thank you, Victor! Why didn't anyone think of this method of automating worksheets before? You can upload any worksheet (please don't violate copyright laws) and then drag text entry boxes on top of the worksheet in order to allow your students to enter the answers online. You--the teacher--enter the correct answers when you create the text boxes, which allows the software to give students instant feedback, turning correct answers green and wrong ones red. Your students will even get their total score circled in red in the upper lefthand corner of the worksheet.

It's this easy.

I can't wait to use this new tool with my literacy learners soon. It will provide students with a chance to review a worksheet we did during the week, perhaps one they did not do well on the first time.

I'm on Instagram !

"You can't teach an old dog new tricks."

That's a saying the seniors and I have been having a lot of fun with lately.

We are discovering that you can, indeed.

We are just in the midst of our needs assessment for the new term, which means we have to choose which themes and topics are of greatest interest to us. We'll be setting goals and plotting courses for reaching those goals.

Friday is the day when some seniors peter out, so to speak. A five-day school week is quite a load for an octogenarian, you have to admit. And yet, I have to get them through that door somehow. So Fridays have traditionally been the day on which I offer something extra, something special. At times that has been an hour in the computer lab after break, at other times it has been a pronunciation lesson or short, easy (and amazing) true story that we read and digest together.

Now it seems that nothing I do is quite enticing enough. I have to get out the big guns. The seniors have asked me if I would please take them on more field trips. So the first two I have scheduled on Fridays. Is that wrong of me?

Oh, but I digress. This isn't even what I wanted to blog about this week.

Over the weekend I managed to open and begin using an Instagram account. You can follow me; I'm JOYofESL. I think I'm going to enjoy Instagram even more than Twitter. I really love snapping pictures in the moment and sharing them quickly with just a word or hashtag or two.

I was keen to share my discovery with the seniors. I turned this Friday into a bit of a tech tasting party. We watched this video about a Korean grandfather who now has an Instagram account with a huge following. Seeing this prompted one student to get out her phone, open Instagram, which she already had installed, and follow "drawings_for_my_grandchildren."

We also played with the Google Cardboard units I ordered over the summer. Don't tell anyone that I got knock-offs from China for $3 each, okay? The students loved them. One was keen to order her own for her family. My student who has macular degeneration can play ping pong but cannot read worksheets even when I use a 24 pt font. But he WAS able to visit the Eiffel Tower using the virtual reality viewer. Cool! I wonder what might happen if I turned a team loose on an assignment to teach the rest of the class about Google Cardboard? Hmmmm. Project-based learning, anyone?

How about you? What were your first weeks like back at work / school? I would love to hear!

What did YOU teach this week?

Having a bad cold is really no excuse. If you want to build readership of a blog, you need to stick to the promised schedule and post regularly. So I apologize.

The fact is that I had hoped to publish a post about tackling pronunciation in the ESL classroom, but the post grew so long that I'll now have to publish it in two instalments. I'm still working on it. In the meantime, why don't I just tell you what I taught this past week and which resources I found most useful?

My morning class asked to learn how to shop online. I used the English for Financial Literacy documents by the Toronto Catholic District School Board found on the Settlement.org wiki. The volume for CLB 3-5 was VERY helpful.

I also found a presentation on Decoda.ca called Shopping and Banking Safely Online, which fit our needs perfectly.

One student began using Amazon.ca as a result of what we learned during this week-long unit. However, they chose to get into a different (though connected) topic next: how to get and use a credit card.

My afternoon (LINC Literacy) class had just finished a week of learning some language to R/W/L and speak about food staples. Our second week of the FOOD unit was spent setting up the classroom just like Food Basics--our only supermarket in the downtown core. After learning shopping vocabulary such as shopping bag, shopping cart, list, aisle, frozen, canned, fresh, dairy, meat and produce, we practiced short dialogues.

For example, this was a chain drill that snaked around the class, with A holding a plastic bag and B holding a reusable bag.

A:  Do you need a bag?

B:  No, thank you. I have a bag.

We also practiced:

A:  Excuse me, where is the _______?

B:  It's on aisle ____.  (Or: It's at the back; it's in dairy; it's next to the milk; it's at the front, etc.)

A:  Thanks.

B:  No problem.

After a tour of the store, students set off in teams of three to complete a scavenger hunt. Each team had a different set of items and prices to find.  The T.A. and I took pictures of the field trip so as to be able to put the photos into a Language Experience Approach booklet. The students will add the language then learn to read it fluently over the course of a week.

I am really looking forward to the week preceding Thanksgiving. We will use the items we purchased at the supermarket to make a pumpkin pie. Yum!

What did you do with your class(es) this week?

Using a Free Online Translator

cheat sheet with screen shots

On Friday, our computer lab day, I noticed that many of the students in my morning class were using their electronic dictionaries to look up one unknown word after another as they visited various internet sites to which I had provided links from our classroom blog. When I asked them if they ever considered copying and pasting whole pages of text into an online translator to save time, they asked me to show them how to do that. I tried walking them through the steps, projecting the process onto the big screen at the front of the lab as they followed along. There are only a few steps, ones that strike me as simple. But these students are far from digital natives. 

The oldest of them said, "I can't do it."

I told this gentleman--who has learned to unlock the computers using Ctrl-Alt-Del, put in the password, hit enter, open the internet and navigate to our classroom blog--that I believed he could indeed learn to do it.

"You have to give it to us slowly, step by step," he said.

And so I made up a little cheat sheet with screen shots that they can bring with them each lab day. We went through the steps again, very slowly, as they made notes on the handout in their L1. They informed me, when all was said and done, that Google Translate does not render a high quality translation--something you probably already know. I showed them how to shop around for a better free online translator. After comparing how several rendered the same paragraph, they let me know that WorldLingo had done the best job, so I've included a note to that effect at the end of the cheat sheet. You can download the 2-page handout with screen shots and bright arrows from the Tricks, Tips & Tutorials Page.

If this comes in handy for your class, I hope you'll leave a comment. Or if you have reasons to be opposed to such an idea because of the nature of your class, you can share that, too.

Can a Classroom Blog Save Your Sanity?

When I landed my first LINC position just a few years ago, I learned that most instructors took their students to the computer lab once a week. My morning class was a special demographic--all over the age of fifty. They wanted to gain computer skills, too! They told me of their desire to see grandchildren's pictures on Facebook, set up email accounts so they could send and receive pictures, and even look for volunteer or paying jobs.

In my early capacity as teaching assistant, I had the opportunity to see how other instructors used the lab. One teacher would hand out a piece of paper with the URLs of sites her students were to visit during the class period. Each URL looked to be about a mile long with lots of dots, dashes, slashes and non-words. There was no way my seniors were going to be able to type those in without making errors. I knew I would spend the whole period responding to their pleas for help, hurrying from one station to the next, barely getting one person on the right website before another was once again staring at a flashing advertisement luring him to come play a free round of Slay the Dragon. Then it hit me. Why not use a blog? I could post a little message for them on the evening before lab day along with clickable links of quizzes, pages from talking picture dictionaries, and videos tied to the week's learning. It would be a buffet system whereby students would decide which activities they felt would be most helpful to them.

Well, it worked! A few had to learn to use a mouse, but after that, the only web navigation skills they needed were: clicking hyperlinks and using the back arrow to return to the list of links. With just a little time invested in familiarizing themselves with this routine, they were soon self-sufficient in the lab. No more running around for me! Not only that, but the blog has proven to be a place to showcase our achievements.

Not long after this, I happily inherited a LINC literacy class in the afternoon. These students had never visited the computer lab. Would a blogging platform also work to enable them to enjoy self-paced, self-directed learning? There was one way to find out. First, though, I had to create another web log just for them. There was no way that they could have made heads or tails of my other classroom blog. It was far too cluttered, the font too small.

Following "best practices" guidelines for creating literacy materials (no font smaller than 18 point, lots of white space, few choices), I created Kelly's Literacy Class. I replicated a practice that works very well for me in the literacy classroom: by establishing a somewhat predictable weekly routine, I enable learners' entire cognitive burden to be dedicated to the content to be learned while the directions for the task can go on autopilot. Thus students choose between Starfall and SpellingCity. Within SpellingCity, a student might opt to spend the entire hour trying to ace the spelling test on our week's words (which I loaded the night before). Or she might choose to explore a few of the games, such as hangman or Sentence Unscramble. I will have edited the sentences so that they are ones we have been working with all week.

I'm happy to report that this way of using a blogging platform to make computer lab day stress-free for the instructor has been so successful that my colleagues have almost all followed suit. The one teacher who used to avoid the lab at all cost now takes her class to the lab and has her own blog that is cleaner, more beautiful, and better organized than mine.

In spring of 2013, I was invited by TESL Windsor to present "A Classroom Blog for Beginners." Even though technology failed us that day when we overwhelmed the server, many participants have since approached me to let me know they are using their new blogs in the lab or classroom. I really appreciate that feedback! I also shared this idea during a literacy webinar and was thrilled to learn that one fellow ESL literacy educator was inspired to create her own literacy blog--and has since won an award, I might add!

This May I will facilitate a webinar on the same topic, this time aimed specifically at teachers of ESL literacy learners. I'll be sure to announce it on my website under WORKSHOPS as soon as the publicity comes out.

 Do you use a blog with students? If so, how? If not, why not?