Skills teachers need for working with technology and people

Teachers in Adult Community Education (ACE) aka LearnLocal, are often delivering language and literacy programs to people with not much prior education. 

What do you think are the most important skills for teachers working in the LearnLocal sector, or who are teaching adults in general? 

(Please add your thoughts via the comment section below.)

There are articles online suggesting that teachers these days need a huge range of skills with technology, on top of their already enormous and well-documented matrix of educational abilities. 

I have been trying to build up a list that makes sense for teachers in LearnLocal organisations. The more I think about it, there's a lot of complexity. It's not easy either, to say whether some skills are fundamental & others more advanced. Should social media and web applications go in the fundamental list these days? 

Fundamental

• Basic operations & interface
     (turn on machine, open applications, work keyboard-mouse-touch-windows etc)
• Word processing
• Project screen from one device to another
• Search and navigate the web
• Manage files & folders
     (across multiple file locations inc usb, LAN & cloud)
• Find resources & learning activities on the web
     (and adapt for your learners)
• Build a presentation
• Work / play with a range of devices
     (including photocopier, scanner, camera, iPad or tablet, smart phone, television, data projector, audio recorder, laptop / desktop computer, )
  Call for help when you need it 
•    (eg IT department)

Compile student work into a booklet they can take away

Pages from Carmela's students' Recipe Book

Create a book from the students’ work. 

Here's a good story for the end of the year. Carmela just came into the office and showed us all the booklet she's compiled from her students' writing and multimedia work.

Carmela’s students wrote up their recipes and took photos when they made each dish. Carmela then compiled the recipes and photos into a publication that students could take away with them at the end of the year. 

The technology they've used includes: 

• Microsoft word, 
• digital camera, 
• file management, 
• cooking equipment.

Notes from August sessions

Plenty of great discussion at our recent group session on 29 August. 

We covered a lot of ground in this session:

• talking about the potential of using tablets in the classroom
• different ways to store passwords
• what to do with the teacher resource wiki
• the network drive for students is UP
• an idea of using google+ communities to connect different groups of students

Tablets

• How to choose (android vs iPad vs microsoft). Criteria could include, for example:
• battery life, apps, fitzroy readers (available on iOs only).
• What could we do with them?
• read (web, articles, stories), write (documents), listen (mp3), speak (eg skype),
• make things like video, presentations, documents,
• take photos, record audio, share documents,
• Will they suit our learners?
• What about this idea of getting 1 or 2 rather than a full class set? The idea is to explore possibilities, and then make a business case for getting the full set.

Related resources: someone in Queensland created this collection of mobile apps for language and literacy learning: "Love Apptually".

Digital storytelling - can it be useful for ESL classes?

Had a great session (back in June) with Betty and Ourania. We compared 2 different tools for creating a digital story: powerpoint vs movie maker*.

Essentially the process is the same for both:

1. create your idea and a short script
2. collect photos and audio files (media)
3. import your media into the program editing area (stage?)
4. add effects or animation, tweak the timing, add credits etc
5. export the movie

In favour of powerpoint: 

• teachers and students are more likely to already know the program
• you can add text to the screen much more easily (a mix of images and text can be useful for language learning)
• you have more options in your animations

In favour of movie maker: 

Let's make the teacher wiki even more useful..

At the group session on 04 July'14, we talked about ways to re-work the staff wiki. 

Teachers at Lalor have put PLENTY of effort into sharing ideas and resources, and these resources are all shared under teacher names. However, when we look for useful ideas & activities, we're more likely to search by theme, certificate module or language skill.

So we thought, let's try collecting resources by theme, and see if that could be more useful. We decided to start with just one theme, and thought that FOOD would be the best place to start.

Suggestion for your collaboration

1) The idea: each teacher gathers 1-3 tasks, activities or resources relating to the theme of FOOD (and 4 other themes - see quiz below)

• share your activities or resources up on the teacher wiki page on food (direct link), 
• in the right level
• with some helpful description for other teachers

Notes from July sessions - from staff wiki to cloud storage

So we had another session during the July break. A huge thanks to the dedicated folk who made it in to share ideas and resources. We talked about useful sites online, how to share resources better, ideas for student and teacher wikis and more. I'll put up some brief notes here.. if you want more details on anything, get in touch or leave a comment.

Great suggestions:

• Use the teacher wiki for sharing resources focussed on a theme, rather than each teacher! We tossed up some themes people have in common, decided to focus on FOOD.. and that's our task for the month. More on this very soon. 
• Wiki: put a link to the staff wiki on the new website, for easy access.

Can you help? people are searching for:

• internet resources focussing on numeracy (Paula)
• video quiz tool (Michael).

Useful sites people have used in the classroom:

Working with images and layout (in microsoft word)

Spent some time last week working with Violeta, who wanted to teach her students about the basics of layout. We started off with putting images on the page. The main issue here of course, is that there are so many different applications, and each has a slightly different way of working with images.

So we chose to look at microsoft word, and the basic way of inserting a photo from the "Insert Menu".

You can insert a photo from within the application, or you can drag the photo across from a file manager (eg windows explorer).

I have followed up with a help file, intended to be easy-to-read. Actually I'm very happy with the file, because it's the first time I've managed to "screen-grab" all those different cursors in word. One of the hardest things to explain is how the cursor changes when you move the mouse. Hopefully this document will help with that.

You can use this with students - let me know how it goes, via the comments below.

• Link to file here (pdf, 1mb).

Use what's already there - if you can find it..

Betty - one of the wonderful teachers at Lalor LLC - spent a fair bit of time creating some activities in powerpoint, that let her students match images with audio. But then she found this website "English Guide" (dot org), and decided it was much better to use resources that someone else had already made.

"They have everything," she exclaimed delightedly. Every theme and topic you could want for low-level English as a second language (ESL) learners.

What a good point this teacher has made! Why spend hours creating learning materials, when there are existing resources out there already?


Please give us some feedback in the comments below - what are the best internet resources you use for teaching ESL?

Exploring online surveys

We had such a great group session in February. I love it when - in spite of the session plan - people make it really clear that they're interested in something different.

From the teacher survey I'd sent around, it seemed that people were most interested in digital storytelling and recording student voices.

So we started the session by looking at this teacher survey, a combination of online form and spreadsheet containing the results. And boom! People were suddenly interested in the possible classroom application of this kind of software.

So the big question is now: how to use online surveys to connect with adult learners in an ESL or literacy classroom?

Your mission, should you choose to accept it

Create a learning activity for your students, involving some kind of online survey.

• Demand as much support as you need, 
• and be ready to tell your colleagues what happened.