The Virginia Adult Learning Resource Center

For Administrators Learn new program adminstration techniques for outreach and communication. Gain exposure to free wikis, blogs, and and audio/visual materials.

You may register online at the VALRC calendar (http://www.calendar.valrc.org). Click on the workshop's heading and complete the online form. Directions will be sent upon registration.

The Media Library of Teaching Skills

The Media Library of Teaching Skills (MLoTS) project, a free web-based library of short digital videos of adult education classrooms and tutorials. These videos are intended to applicable to all levels of ESOL, ABE, and GED instruction.

Technology in ABE

The theme of the winter 2007 issue of Field Notes, published by the Massachusetts System for Adult Basic Education Support (SABES) with support from the Massachusetts Department of Education, is Technology in ABE.

Creating an Education Wiki

PB Wiki will help you create a Wiki in seconds. This online feature also answers the following questions for educators: How to create a collaborative classroom; Use a calendar in the classroom; Engage students with a chatroom, add plugins; Student safety, Data security, and sample educator wikis.

Click on the link and discover an exciting new way to manage your classroom or communicate with your students.

Spotlight on Two Literacy Blogs

Literacy Source: A Community Learning Center is a blog created for tutors who teach adult literacy students. Find information on Learning Differences, ESL Links, and Literacy Links. The topics include posts on ESL, Lesson Plans, Jail Literacy, Math, New Tutor, Pre-Literate ESL, and more. This site is well worth a tutor's visit!

AlphaPlus Blog provides a slightly different perspective, pointing tutors to links in its posts, and providing topics in a drop down menu.

GED® On Demand featured in KET's Adult Learning Quarterly

The January 2008 issue of Kentucky Educational Television's (KET) Adult Learning Quarterly features an article on the uses of Video on Demand and streaming technologies in the field of adult education. The article includes comments by the VALRC's Instructional Technology Specialist, Richard Sebastian, and makes extensive mention of Virginia's GED On Demand and streaming video projects.

To download the pdf file of this issue of the ALQ, click on the link below: http://valrc.org/publications/pdf/ALQ_Jan08.pdf

Or you can access the downloads page of KET's Adult Education site: http://www.ketadultlearning.org/htms/downloads.htm

New Promotional Materials Available for Download!

Promotional materials for the Virginia Adult Learning Resource Center's new programs and initiatives are now available online on the VALRC website. These attractive brochures, posters, and flyers are provided in pdf format (with printer's lines) so you can easily print and distribute as many of them as you like to your program's teachers and students. These publications can help you promote the new eLearn Virginia distance learning program, the GED® On Demand program for digital cable subscribers.

To access these printable pdf files, click here. If you have any questions about content, file formats, or technical issues, please contact the VALRC's Assistant Instructional Technology Specialist, Christopher Poole at cpoole2@vcu.edu.

VALRC Has Upgraded its Events Calendar, Registration System

The VALRC has launched a new online events calendar to replace our previous system. Not only is our new calendar simpler and easier to use, but users now have the ability to register for events online through the calendar interface!

Navigating the calendar On the VALRC website, click on the Calendar tab at the top of the page.
You'll be taken to a list of upcoming events, with the nearest events listed near the top. On the right, you'll see a small monthly calendar. Days with scheduled trainings or other events are highlighted in red. Clicking on a specific day will take you to that day's events.

If you want a more concise look at our upcoming events, there is a list titled Upcoming Events for the Next 90 Days on the right hand side of the page that offers a quick overview of events. This list is also clickable.

Registering for events Under the title of each event is a link in green text that says Click here to register for this event. When you click that link , it will take you to another page with a full description of the event and a short online form at the bottom of the page. To register, complete all of the fields in this form and then click the Send Registration button. Voila--you're registered for the event you chose, and should receive registration confirmation via the email address you provided on the form.

If you have any questions about registering for events, please contact Marianne Baker (mdbaker@vcu.edu) or Christopher Poole (cpoole2@vcu.edu).

Two new (and free) ways to watch GED Connection episodes

Adult learners across the state of Virginia now have two exciting new ways to access all 39 GED Connection episodes. The 39 instructional programs, produced by KET-TV, cover the subjects and skills students need to pass the GED® tests. With the two new viewing options described below, learners will be able to receive quality GED preparation at times that fit their schedules, alleviating the needs for transportation and child care.

GED ON DEMAND

Virginians who subscribe to either Comcast or Cox Digital Cable can now watch any of the GED Connection episodes from the comfort of their home any time they want. This initiative, a partnership between the Commonwealth of Virginia, Comcast and Cox Communications, the Virginia Department of Education's Office of Adult Education & Literacy, and the Virginia Adult Learning Resource Center, integrates the GED Connection videos into the "ON DEMAND" programming that Cox and Comcast offer free to their digital cable customers.

eLEARN Virginia: a free statewide distance learning GED program

eLEARN Virginia is a new statewide distance learning initiative, funded by the DOE/OAEL and managed by the VALRC, now freely available to your GED students. eLEARN Va is a great option for any student who has access to a networked computer and either a) can't attend face-to-face GED classes at your center, b) must interrupt their face-to-face GED class due to employment, transportation, or childcare issues, or c) wants supplementary GED lessons to work on outside of their regular face-to-face GED class. eLEARN Va is also an option for any out of school youth, formally released from compulsory attendance, interested in working towards a GED online.

Tech Soup

From The Foundation Center:

At TechSoup Stock, hundreds of donated computer products are available from partners such as Cisco, Intuit, Adobe, Symantec, Microsoft, and more.

New product donations from Microsoft: Office 2007, Windows Vista, Exchange Server 2007, Visio 2007, and more new releases.

Administrative fees are as low as 4% of retail value, and no membership fee is required. Since 2002, over 50,000 nonprofits across the United States and Canada have accessed the software and hardware products they need at TechSoup Stock.

Click here to visit Tech Soup to request donated computer products for your organization.

Self-Guided Free Online Technology Workshops

Catalyst is a website developed by the University of Washington. Catalyst provides "How-To" guides and step-by-step instructions for common online tasks, such as document and data management (Word, Access, and Excel), how to use videos, creating graphics, and understanding web publishing. You'll also find links to instructions for related tasks, as well as tips and teaching guides to support your teaching goals.

Click here to enter the Catalyst Help Center

Technology Resources for Administrators

We have identified these online resources as valuable technology tools for administrators. If you have any questions about why they are included or how to use any of the free web services, please contact Victoire Gerkens Sanborn at vjsanbor@vcu.edu or Jim Andre at andrejh@vcu.edu, or call 800-237-0178.

Resources for Locating Electronic Texts on the Internet

Find an extensive list of resources for downloading electronic texts on the Internet on this link, including those on Project Gutenberg. Why is this helpful? These texts can be altered for your student (change in font size or font, and double spaced) and you can print out just a few paragraphs at a time. This is an especially helpful technique with low level literacy students.

FACTS AND STATISTICS

Welcome to the Virginia Adult Learning Resource Center's Finding Facts and Statistics weblog. On this post, you will find a collection of descriptions of and links to websites and information you will need in your grant writing, marketing, and public awareness endeavors.

The post is divided in to several sections, which are indicated by the menu at the bottom.

We've also featured a site or two for each topic, which are highlighted in the menu. These featured sites are the ones we think you are likely to rely upon time and again for up-to-date and specific information that supports your work.

If you have any questions, please contact Vicky Sanborn at the Resource Center, 804-828-6521 (in Richmond), 800-237-0178 (toll-free). You can also drop an email with questions and comments at vjsanbor@vcu.edu.

LITERACY TECHNOLOGY LINKS

These links will be introduced at a Technology Workshop at the 2007 VAILL in Radford, VA by Victoire Gerkens Sanborn and James Andre.

MAIN LINKS

ESLPod.com

The definition of Podcast on the Literacy Tent Wiki is: "Pod casting" is making audio files (most commonly in MP3 format) available online in a way that allows software to automatically download the files for listening at the user's convenience. Podcasts can be used to connect directly to learning activities or you can create your own.

ESLPod.com

Note from Nancy Faux: The ESLPod is a great way to obtain recorded dialogues to use in your class. In order to exploit them for classroom use, however, you will need to create a lesson plan around them. This lesson plan should, of course, include all the essential elements of a good ESOL lesson: review/warm-up, introduction, presentation, practice, extension and on-going evaluation activities. Remember to make your classes as interactive as possible allowing your students to practice using the language.

ESLPod.com is run by a volunteer team of experienced English as a Second Language professors with over 30 years of high school, adult, and university ESL teaching experience. Dr. Lucy Tse writes scripts and story ideas for all of the podcasts, and records many of the dialogs and stories. The host for the podcast is Dr. Jeff McQuillan, who helps read the scripts and provides explanations for them.

A new 15-minute podcast is prepared every day. Topics include: "Seeing a Specialist," "How to Work in the United States," "Giving Opinions in a Meeting," "Getting a Driver's License," "Getting a Man's Haircut," "Shopping for Shoes," and "Giving Birth in a Hospital.

The podcasts are free. All podcasts come with an 8-10 page Learning Guide, with complete transcripts and more vocabulary, explanations, cultural information, and much more for members, who are asked to pay $10 per month for the Learning Guides.

Teachers Guides are free for the teacher, but students are asked to pay a discounted price, depending on the number of students in a class.

The site currently offers 275 podcasts. More questions? Email: ESLpod@eslpod.com

Teaching With Weblogs and Wikis

The Minnesota Literacy Council has created a wonderful page on teaching with weblogs and wikis. Click here to find the following weblogs:

Jen Ouellette's high beginning FWE (Functional Work English) class in Arlington Hills

Jessica's ACES (Adult Computer and Employment Skills) class in Minneapolis

Susan Wetenkamp's Minneapolis ESL classes

Barry Bakin's class in California

George's summer class in Washington D.C.

Wendy's Advanced writing and grammar class class in Vancouver, Canada

Rosa's advanced AMEP (Adult Migrant English Programme) in Sydney, Australia

And wikis:

Reading and Writing Skills

Peanut Butter wiki

Wikihow

Seedwiki

Child And Family WebGuide

The Child & Family WebGuide from Tufts University is a directory that evaluates, describes and provides links to hundreds of sites containing child development research and practical advice. Online searches for many parent topics yield information that is inconsistent with child development research. The WebGuide selects sites that have the highest quality child development research and that are parent friendly, and rates them.

The sites in the family, education, typical development and health categories provide child development articles with research findings. The sites in the resources category provide child development articles with practical information.

Click here to enter the website. (www.cfw.tufts.edu/)

Google for Educators

Google offers a site as a platform of teaching resources - for everything from blogging and collaborative writing to geographical search tools and 3D modeling software - and the staff at Google want you to fill it in with your great ideas.

To the left of the home page, you'll find a teacher's guide to free Google products, including basic information about each tool, examples of how educators are using them, and lesson ideas. You'll also find lesson plans and videos from our partners at Discovery Education focusing on two of our most popular teaching tools: Google Earth and Google SketchUp.

Click here to enter the site.

Usable Knowledge: A New Website for Educators and Researchers

From HGSE News, December 2006

The Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) today launched a new Web site aimed at connecting the research of its faculty with educators in the field. The Usable Knowledge Web site features a diverse set of media - text, video, and audio - to make the leading research of its faculty accessible to educators all over the world.

Webquests for Adult Learners

Webquests are another way to actively engage your adult student in learning a topic, enhancing their computer skills in the process. This link from NIFL (National Instititute for Literacy) leads to the following webquests: How to Find a Good Job, Eating Right for a Healthier Life, Managing Your Money, Economic Security, Dream Vacation, and more.

Find a template on this site to help you create your own Webquest for your student. Developed by the Spartanburg County school district in South Carolina, the site also provides webquests created by its teachers. Webquest topics include: Career Inventory, Colonial Williamsburg, Children of the Holocaust, Ancient Egypt, Aztec Adventure, Social Science, and more. Scroll to the bottom of the page to find them.

Here's an Ellis Island Webquest. Great for ESOL students.

EPN: The Education Podcast Network

Podcasts provide an easy and versatile reinforcement to student lessons. These audio and visual files are easily downloaded into an MP3 player or your computer. They appeal to the auditory learner and add variety to the teaching experience.

EPN, or the Education Podcast Network, is an effort to bring together into one place, the wide range of podcast programming that may be helpful to teachers looking for content to teach with and about, and to explore issues of teaching and learning in the 21st century. They provide another way for your student to do independent work.

Subjects include math, science, second languages, social studies, and career development. Be aware that this service merely lists these free podcasts. You will need to make sure that the content is appropriate before suggesting them to your students or incorporating them into a lesson. To find a podcast on the site, click here.

Examiner/Program Manager Conferences and Technological Developments

Between October 4-6, Virginia's Adult Education program managers and GED examiners held annual conferences to talk about upcoming changes in the GED test and trends in classroom instruction. Although most of the details are still developing, it was revealed that the Office of Adult Education and Learning (OAEL) will be mandating content standards for Virginia's GED instruction, and on a national scale, changes are on the horizon for the GED test itself. A few anecdotal items are worth noting.

First off, according to the GED Testing Service, most GED test-takers are more computer savvy than adult educators may realize. By 2011, we can expect to see computer-based testing, and initial field testing shows that adult learners are performing just as well on a computer as on a paper and pencil test. It would be reasonable to infer from this that the GED test will eventually present questions that relate directly to the online experience that has become so common in today's workforce and the traditional high school setting. So, be sure to check out VALRC's online professional development and Polilogue discussions about eLearning, so you can keep pace with the technological needs of today's adult learners. Another harbinger of the GED's shift toward technology are Virginia's new systems of online test registration and nearly instant online retrieval of GED scores. Clearly, Virginia's field of Adult Education is committed to staying ahead of the curve.

This year's program managers meeting saw the unveiling of a draft form of the new GED Content Standards. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of content standards, check out the Content Standards Warehousehttp://www.adultedcontentstandards.org/. According to the draft's preface, "These standards have been written and disseminated to provide a framework for instruction and program design in adult GED programs in Virginia. They are not prescriptive but, rather comprise a guide for what is expected of each learner to know and be able to do in order to pass the GED tests." The OAEL's steering committee that has been busy for the past two years writing these guidelines will be accepting feedback during periodic Polilogue Jams, where drafts of both the GED and ESOL standards can be found. For more information, or if you aren't registered with Polilogue, please contact Debbie Bergtholdt.

Online Support From Microsoft

Microsoft offers a variety of free support services online. Here are some sites you might want to bookmark for a quick reference:

Microsoft Services

Microsoft Help and Support: Main Page

Microsoft Troubleshooting and Support

Security Updates from Microsoft

Microsoft Download Center

Registration for Online Courses Is Now Open

The Resource Center is excited to offer all of our online courses this fall. These courses are free to adult educators in Virginia, and you may complete them on your own schedule in the convenience of your home or office.

Courses offered are Adults as Learners: An Orientation, ESOL Basics, and Using Technology to Enhance GED Instruction. The registration deadline for all courses is Friday, October 13; courses begin Monday, October 16. Register now to reserve your spot in one of our innovative online courses! More information and registration for each course is available below:

• Adults as Learners: An Orientation
• ESOL Basics

• Using Technology to Enhance GED Instruction

If you have any questions regarding these courses, please contact Lauren Ellington at leellington@vcu.edu or 800-237-0178.

"Assistive Technology, Instructional Technology, and Universal Design Strategies for Adult Literacy" Discussion

Beginning Tuesday, September 19th through Friday, September 22nd, there will be a guest discussion on the National Institute for Literacy's Technology listserv on "Assistive Technology, Instructional Technology, and Universal Design Strategies for Adult Literacy" with guest facilitator Dr. Dave Edyburn of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. To subscribe to the list, go to: http://www.nifl.gov/mailman/listinfo/Technology.