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.

Free Library Resource

When our newest teacher asked me the other day for a copy of the "Using the Public Library" worksheets, puzzle pieces, and unit plan that has been passed around among several of my colleagues since I developed it, I was surprised to find that I'd never posted it with other freebies on my website. That was probably because it included a transcript of an audio lesson I did not have permission to replicate or upload. So I've deleted that part, making the whole thing sharable under a Creative Commons license.

Literacy student using her new card

Literacy students comparing borrowed items

Now is a great time to plan a field trip with your students to the closest library branch. At my school, we're fortunate enough to be within easy walking distance to the main branch. I take my literacy class there each spring and fall, avoiding the walk during the broiling hot and bitterly cold months.

A unit plan and photocopiable materials for CLB 3 and up are under FREE RESOURCES - Settlement Themes - Community and Government Services. For literacy level, we spend a couple of weeks skill-building, then write a Language Experience Approach story around our trip, which we learn to read during the week following the field trip.

How about you? Do you take your class to the library to teach them how to access resources and get a free borrower's card? If you do, I really hope these materials are useful to you. Please leave a comment if they are.

Free Language Activities for iPad Lesson

Hello!

This coming week I will be introducing both my morning and afternoon classes to the iPad. Among the students in my multi-level seniors' class, two of them own or can borrow an iPad from a family member. Those who don't have access to one often gather curiously around the iPad users. They are eager to learn about this tool in so as to decide whether purchasing one would be a worthwhile investment.

I have developed some worksheets to get our week started and have put the language activity pack on my FREE RESOURCES - COMPUTER page for you to download. As usual, the resource is a Word document, which allows you to easily edit and tailor for your learners. As our week progresses, I will get a feel for what is working well, what additional resources we need, where they want more focus, etc.  So I will go back into that activity pack and add, correct any errors we discover, etc. If you find any problems with it or have suggestions for enhancements, feel free to leave a comment.

In my afternoon (literacy) class, I have been using one iPad with the newest student for about two weeks. I am amazed at how her self-directed, self-paced practice with the app iWrite Words has trained her to form each letter of the alphabet perfectly. With this app, you have to trace each capital and each small letter with your finger or stylus. If you try to write any stroke backward or out of order, it won't let you proceed. You have to follow the little crab fellow (or is it a ladybug?) as it leads you through the strokes.  Having spent about three hours per week for two weeks using this application, the new students now models wonderful penmanship when she comes up to the board to fill in a blank. I am impressed!

I am thinking that we will do something like stations to introduce a handful of classroom apps. I could ask each partnership to familiarize themselves with one of six applications. Then we can do an "each one teach one" activity in which one partner stays at the station to teach others who visit that station. At halftime, I can ring the bell, at which point the itinerant student returns to his/her station, becoming a teacher and allowing the formerly stationary student to travel around to learn about the other apps.

I have uploaded a nascent iPad language activity pack for literacy learners to the FREE RESOURCES - COMPUTER page back on my website for you to download and enjoy with your class. I will be shaping, improving and adding to it this week as learners give me feedback.

What are your ideas for other activities I can facilitate around the iPad? 

Thanks for visiting my blog. I hope you'll leave a comment, even if it's just to tell me whether the snow has yet melted where you are. ;)

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P.S. Check out my WORKSHOPS page. I am excited to announce that I'll be facilitating a webinar in May on creating a blog for the ESL literacy classroom. I especially want to encourage teachers who are not terribly comfortable with technology to give this webinar a shot. We are going to take it slow and easy, step by step.

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?