Talk to Me

Instead of talking to you this week, I'd like you to talk to me. How can I--with my website of free materials and my weekly blog posts--better meet your needs? I hope you will take a moment to answer six questions for me.

Click HERE to take the six-question survey.

Cheers!

What's Up at Joy of ESL?

There is a lot going on right now for me as a language instructor, perpetual student, blogger, webmaster, and creator / illustrator of learning materials! Since everything I'm doing right now leaves no time for a separate blog post, I thought I would simply write about what I'm up to. Would you like a peek under the hood?

The thing that gives me most pleasure is illustrating. When I first started making activity packs to complement literacy readers, I did not know how to easily create illustrations. My earliest attempts were simple black line drawings done in the free Paint application that came pre-loaded on my computer. I drew a scarf, hat, and boots using my finger on my laptop's trackpad.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I am using Google Drawing to create images such as this medical form and health card. I can't say enough good things about the online "Classy Graphics" course I took in Google Classroom with Tony Vincent. Without that class, I would not know how to use Google Drawing at all. Anyway, the image of a blank piece of paper on a clipboard was free for the taking on Pixabay.com. I send them a donation after every 20 or 30 images that I use.  I also found the caduceus on Pixabay and simply shrank it down to fit in the upper left corner of the piece of paper. The rest of the form was created using text boxes in Google Drawing.

The image of a health card was created almost entirely in Google Drawing. I imported only Maria's face, which I drew using a Wacom Intuos Draw graphic tablet and Artrage software in trace mode over a photo from the reader.

The walk-in clinic image started with a photo of an actual clinic in downtown Windsor that I believe my students are familiar with. I traced the sidewalk and greenery, made the canvas transparent, exported that as a PNG file, and imported it into Google Drawing in order to create the building, doors, and signs using shapes and text boxes.

For some images, I don't open Google Drawing at all, but just use the graphic tablet, such as was the case with this depiction of the nurse who calls Maria in from the waiting room. When I was originally given permission to create activity packs for the Bow Valley College readers, I was told I could not use their images. Yet one cannot follow best practices for the creation of materials and worksheets for literacy learners without images! So hopefully the number of images I replicate with modification falls within the scope of what in Canada we call 'fair dealing'.

So! Literacy teachers can look forward to my publishing this new activity pack before too long. It is my hope that you will notice the quality of my materials improving over time.

My own literacy learners are reaching the end of their five-month term with me. Many will be moving on to a mainstream CLB 1 or 1/2 class at the end of this month. I'm so proud that they can now tackle this level of reader and are asking for more challenging material all the time.

Second on my plate right now, aside from teaching itself, is keeping up with the research and latest developments in our ongoing effort to get the powers that be to listen to us, believe us, and respect us when we attempt to inform them of things that are wrong with (or are going wrong with the roll-out of) Portfolio Based Language Assessment experiment. Many problems are inherent, other problems are the result of certain employers' interpretation of the 'non-negotiables.' Either way, we still have a dire need for open, honest, mutually respectful and fruitful communication between front-line workers and the big fish at the top of the food chain. Since I was losing track of all the links, I decided to dedicate a page of my website to the curation of these resources, links to research, and so on. It is HERE. If you have suggestions for better wording or other links, you can comment below, email me, or message me on Twitter.

Thirdly and lastly, I am SO JAZZED that Tony Vincent, the one who taught me how to use Google Drawing, is offering a new course called Classy Videos in February. It's not too late to sign up. It's six weeks, but you do NOT have to be at your computer at a given time on a given day. You always have a week to watch the video and do the (optional) assignment.

All of this has me excited about the new year. How about you? Are you excited?

Making Worksheets Just Got a Whole Lot Easier

It was the early 1990s. I had just moved from a library clerking job (where only the guys were being sent to learn about computers and database building) to a job as library technical assistant in the academic library of a vocational college where I was guaranteed opportunities to learn computer skills. Mine was the noon to closing shift. Quiet evenings found me immersed in the many magazines that had been ordered to support students of courses ranging from robotics to nursing to secretarial.

My favourite magazine was about using WordPerfect; my favourite section was the macro of the month. These were the days when one still dealt with a DOS prompt to talk to others around the world using this crazy new thing called Internet Relay Chat (IRC). 

Macros fascinated me. You could copy lines of code from a page of the magazine into a special hidden 'backroom' area of the word processing software, then click a button and watch as seventeen keystrokes were executed in a 1.5 seconds. Without money for real database software, I controlled the entire magazine and DVD inventory using WordPerfect's mail merge feature. It was sort of like trying to build a house using Crackerjacks toys.

Such skills helped me get a better job. Soon I was office manager of a little independent bookstore where I wore many hats--from payroll clerk to A/P to A/R, shipping and receiving.

WordsWorth Books & Co. going away party for Kelly

In 1999 I moved from Little Rock, Arkansas to Waterloo, insurance capital of Ontario. Insurance companies were hiring, so my versatile liberal arts degree once again came to my rescue. Soon I was roving the aisles of the computing section of the many bookstores in that university town, plunking down large amounts of cash for four-inch-thick 'teach yourself' books and John Walkenbach's book on power programming Excel using Visual Basics for Applications (VBA), which became my dog-eared bible. I took a course in basic database building in Access. Within five years I had changed jobs again and was using VBA to customize MS Word, Excel, Outlook and creating business tools for my coworkers and supervisors with lovely graphic user interfaces, pretty buttons to push to run reports, to print out insurance certificates, to calculate the age a client will be on the birthday nearest a policy's maturity date. My apps even had little pop-up messages to remind the user to put the special paper into the printer when it was time.

All of those quasi-technical office skills have served me amazingly well in my new field of English language teaching. But if you have ever made your own classroom materials in MS Word with tables or columns, you know that the application can be a bit cantankerous at times. Even if you know the magic way to see the invisible code that tells the software where to start a new page, a new paragraph, a bulleted list, or a set of columns, it can still be a product that many times leaves you pulling your hair out--especially if you're trying to whip something up right before class or late the night before. It's not terribly intuitive. Mastering it requires the memorization of the placement of scores of commands that are hidden within dozens of menus.

Here are some worksheets and games I use that were created using MS Word:

BINGO game card

Board Game from Val Baggaley

Word Map

Okay, now for the drumroll part. Having heard about the course on Twitter, I've just enrolled in Tony Vincent's course called Classy Graphics with Google Drawings. Oh, heavens, this is going to be a game-changer. It is going to revolutionize how I make classroom materials. I can already see that it's going to save time and is also going to vastly widen the range of possibilities for what I can create for my students or teach them to create for themselves. 

I'm only on week two of six, but here is a sneak peek at some things I've created so far.

In place of the word map above, here is a word map created in Google Drawings:

Now if you're not familiar with Google Drawings, you might not be aware of the vast difference between the two because the biggest difference here isn't in appearance so much in ease of creation and editing. If I want to change the Word version, I have to go into a convoluted menu system to do so. If I want to change the Google Drawing word map, I need only to grab edges and corners of shapes and drag them into their new spots. GD will tell me when something is perfectly centred. I can easily duplicate a box to get another and another of exactly the same dimensions. I can nest one inside the other. I can ask GD to align shapes for me, distribute them evenly. And this course is only just getting started.

Here are some other fun ways Tony has gotten us to play around with Google Drawings. In week two we learned about designing in black and white. I created some custom sticky notes (there's a template with light grey lines inside which you stick six bright sticky notes before printing your designs--minus the original grey guidelines--onto the stickies).

I can't really put into words how it feels finally to have the right tool at my disposal or how much time this is going to save me as a teacher who loves to create her own stuff. It is a bit like the experience of getting my first real database software package after three years of making do with WordPerfect's mail merge tools used as a database. Yeah, it could be done, but my penny wise pound foolish employer was paying me for five hours of labour for every one hour inventory management would have taken me had they just purchased me FoxPro or Dbase.

How about you? Have you ever used Google Drawings? Do you like it? Are you using your summer to take any online classes or attend any webinars? I would love to hear.