ABE/ESL/VESL: Practical Money Skills for Life

http://practicalmoneyskills.com/english/index.php

Money skills is a necessary lesson for our students. This site has a lot of classroom resources for financial literacy education. It has lessons for all levels of students, from K through adult. The grades 7-12 level includes:
Teens (Grades 7–12) Click here for Special Needs lesson plans
• Introduction
Introduction
• Lesson One
Making Decisions
• Lesson Two
Making Money
• Lesson Three
The Art of Budgeting
• Lesson Four
Living on your Own
• Lesson Five
Buying a Home
• Lesson Six
Banking Services
• Lesson Seven
About Credit
• Lesson Eight
Credit Cards
• Lesson Nine
Cars and Loans
• Lesson Ten
The Influence of Advertising
• Lesson Eleven
Consumer Awareness
• Lesson Twelve
Saving and Investing
• Lesson Thirteen
In Trouble
• Lesson Fourteen
About Consumer Privacy
• Appendix
Appendix

There is a free student budget workbook that can be downloaded from the site. Also included are useful links to other sites. For example, in the lesson on Buying a home, the following links appear:
LESSON FIVE: Buying a Home
FannieMae Homepath
http://www.fanniemae.com/homebuyers/homepath/
Mortgage Information
http://www.bankrate.com/brm/rate/mtg_home.asp
Reverse Mortgages for Seniors
http://www.hud.gov/buying/rvrsmort.cfm
U.S. Dept. of Housing & Urban Development
http://www.hud.gov

ESL: HBeg to HInter: Annenberg Videos on Demand

http://www.learner.org/resources/series71.html?pop=yes&vodid=321741&pid=942#
Connect with English (by Annenberg) <http://www.learner.org/resources/series71.html> -- A video instructional series in English as a second language for college and high school classrooms and adult learners. It follows a 28 year old student from Boston who has a dream of being a singer.
You will need to register for this free site, and it does require a lot of computer memory/bandwidth for the videos. There are grammar lessons and you can purchase books to go along with the videos. Very clear and the actors speak clearly. There 25 half hour programs in Connect With English and each episode has two sections: the story and the discussion group to review and study the videos and learn grammar skills. These are copyrighted videos. It's an interesting way to study English for High Beginning to High Intermediate level students.

ESL: English Learner Movie Guides

http://www.eslnotes.com/

Looking for a fun way for students to practice their English? Here's a great site for movie lovers! Each movie guide includes a look at the characters and the plot, and also includes a long list of vocabulary and culture notes. Just choose a movie from the movie menu, and then download it. (Use PDF if you want to print out the guide.)

ESL: Pronunciation for Students from Hong Kong

http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/cill/pronunci.htm

This is a pronunciation page especially suited for students from Hong Kong. The focus is on specific pronunciation problems.

VESL: Tools for Learning

http://www.tv411.org/learning/

These are great tools for students. I especially liked the sessions on How to Use a Library, Preparing for the GED, Tips for Multiple Choice Questions and Time Management.

Check out these lessons:
Choosing What to Read
Community Resources
Explore Nutrition with Your Child
Finding the Right Resource
How to Use a Library
Knowing Your Learning Style
Preparing for the GED
Taking Medicine Responsibly
The Parts of a Book
Time Management
Tips for Multiple Choice QuestionsWords

VESL: Tools for Learning

http://www.tv411.org/learning/

These are great tools for students. I especially liked the sessions on How to Use a Library, Preparing for the GED, Tips for Multiple Choice Questions and Time Management.

Check out these lessons:
Choosing What to Read
Community Resources
Explore Nutrition with Your Child
Finding the Right Resource
How to Use a Library
Knowing Your Learning Style
Preparing for the GED
Taking Medicine Responsibly
The Parts of a Book
Time Management
Tips for Multiple Choice Questions
Words from Other Languages

VESL/ABE: Resume Writing

Resumes: http://www.10minuteresume.com/ http://jobstar.org/tools/resume/ http://www.provenresumes.com/

Three sites to help your students write their own resumes.

Fun Trip: Springfield, IL, Lincoln Museum

http://www.alplm.org/museum/museum.html

I thought I knew a lot about Lincoln, especially since just having read Doris Kearns Goodwin's new book 'Team of Rivals' A weekend trip to Springfield made me realize that there is a lot more history than I knew. The new Lincoln Museum in Springfield is wonderful, and as you move from Lincoln's early days, to his election, to the Civil War, to the White House and finally to his assasination and funeral, you realize that you don't know everything there is to know.

I especially enjoyed the show 'Through Lincoln's Eyes', the hall of gossip (apparently Mr. Lincoln liked to swear, and most of Washington society disdained Mrs. Lincoln), and the various artifacts. I truly liked being able to touch the brass Lincoln life mask. Most men who have become President age dramatically within their term of office, but the changes in Lincoln's visage were stunning. The information on the Civil War was outstanding as well. It is difficult to believe that over 600,000 American souls were lost in that horrific war. I highly recommend it. It's about a 2 1/2 -3 hour trip directly south on the Interstate, and there are good hotels and restaurants in town. (I like Muldaner's, which is about 2 blocks from the museum). It's worth the visit!

FYI: Cranking up the Laptop

http://laptop.media.mit.edu/

One Laptop per Child, a non-profit group started by faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to design, manufacture and distribute inexpensive (about $100.00) hand-crankable Linux-based laptops for children around the world. The computers would be made by Taiwan based Quanta Computer Inc. and would initially produce 5-15 million units to be sold to governments in China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria and Thailand and given free to children in those countries. When that phase is completed, other countries would be included.
The units are so energy efficient that hand-cranking alone would generate enough power for operation, and mesh networking will give many systems Internet access from one connection.

In my opinion this is a wonderful way to bring children from the entire world together, and I hope that schools in developed nations will interact with the countries who have been given this opportunity. This is a tremendous project and I wish them great success.

Daily Special: Constitution

Although this is posted on the bulletin board, I thought it would be helpful to review some of the Constituion materials that Char and Pat put together as a Daily Special. If you are looking for Constitution materials for students:

For Reading Levels 6.0 and lower:
Origins of the Constitution CD (30 minutes)

America's Story Video (3 minutes each)
Ben Franklin
George Washington

Pre-GED Advantage Social Studies
Lesson 2: A New Nation
Lesson 7: Foundations of Democracy
Lesson 8: Branches of Government

For reading levels above 6.0:

GED Advantage Social Studies
1. U.S. History
Lesson 1: Building a Nation
2. Political Science
Lesson 1: American Democracy
Lesson 2: The Federal Government

For all reading levels:
Online Constitution Study Guide

ESL/IEI: English Grammar Exercises

http://www.easyenglish.com/index.asp Easy English

This site has a lot of free grammar quizzes and tests to help students study everything from present tense to modals.

Here are some more suggestions to help you learn English free: Check out English Club, where you'll find free ESL lessons on grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, listening, speaking, reading, writing and more. Read about the history of English, and how to earn English. Join ESL Forums for lots of discussion in and about English. Use the ESL Help Desk if you have questions about English. Subscribe to 7 Secrets for ESL Learners for free English tips and lessons to your email box. Find English schools to study English in your country or abroad.

ESL/IEI: English Grammar Exercises

http://www.englisch-hilfen.de/en/index.htm Learning English Online

This is a German site, but is a great source for English grammar explanations and exercises. The English Forum is in German, so you may not want to go there unless you speak German. The quizzes are in English, and students can enter and score their results online. They are also designated as 'easy' or 'medium'. There is quite a comprehensive list of grammar subject areas to review, as well as explanations. Students can take more comprehensive tests ('complex') or even practice English with games such as Hangman or Find the Pairs.

IEI/Adv. ESL/GED: Writing

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/index.htm Guide to Grammar and Writing: Dr. Charles Darling, Capital Community College Foundation

This is a comptehensive site for writing skills, including topics from levels such as:
word and sentence level, paragraph level, essay and research paper level and also some good grammar quizzes that are scored online.

ESL/IEI/Tutoring: Pronunciation: Canadian Raising

http://www.yorku.ca/twainweb/troberts/raising.html

Another site to help students identify various accents and dialects. This is on the familiar Canadian sound (also prevalent in some areas of WI and MI) call Canadian Raising. Not a large site, but the examples are good and easy to access.

"Canadian raising is a phonological process characteristic of several varieties of Canadian English, in which the onsets of the diphthongs /ay/ and /aw/ raise to mid vowels when they precede voiceless obstruents (the sounds /p/, /t/, /k/, /s/, and /f/). Click on the speaker icons below to hear genuine examples of Canadian raising."

ESL/IEI/Tutoring: Pronunciation: PBS: Do You Speak American English?

http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/southern/sounds/

PBS Do You Speak American English?

"The good news: It’s widely known. The bad news: Known for what? Guy Bailey and Jan Tillery report on the pluses and minuses of Southern American English in the popular imagination. (The research cited in this essay was first published in 2000.)" The site also includes discussions on the following dialects:

African American English
Smoky Mountains
¡Spanglish!
Texan
Californian
Cajun
Chicano English
Lumbee
Midwest
New York City
Pacific Northwest
Pittsburghese
There is also a dialect quiz (great for group work), take a regional dare and Radio America, all of which give audio examples of the various dialects. A fun site, and useful for Pronunciation classes.

ESL, IEI, Tutoring: Phonics: The Sounds of American English

http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/about.html# Phonetics, The Sounds of American English, University of Iowa, Site contact: kaspar-stromme@uiowa.edu

Created in 2003, this site addresses the sounds of American and Spanish English, and also Articulatory Anatomy (in both English and Spanish). Requires a Quick Time plug-in and newer Operating System (OS). Somewhat slow to load but worth the wait. There is also a helpful troubleshooting section.

• Launch Spanish Library
• Launch English Library
• Articulatory Anatomy

ESL/ABE: Writer's Window

http://english.unitecnology.ac.nz/writers/home.html Writer's Window

An interactive site for students to share and comment on writing and also write collaborative stories. Students can share their writing and poetry, add to continuous stories or join a discussion on writing. There is an excellent 'how to' area: http://english.unitecnology.ac.nz/writers/workshop.html where students can get tips and techniques on writing. There is also a fun 'Reader's Cafe': http://english.unitecnology.ac.nz/readerscafe/cafeflash.php
with a book quiz, reading shelf and sharing page, with sections for teachers as well.

All: ReadWriteThink: Online Learning

http://www.readwritethink.org/: International Reading Association (IRA), National Council Teachers of English (NCTE), MarcoPolo Education Foundation

This site provides various lesson plans for integrating Internet content into literacy lessons.It includes grade appropriate lesson plans (reading levels K-12) and applies NCTE/IRA standards.
You can search for lessons by reading level, literacy strand or literacy engagement.

There is also an extensive list of web resources:(http://www.readwritethink.org/resources/index.asp)

Commentary: Sotir: State of the Art vs. State of the Use

There are a lot of educational blogs out in the blogosphere, and I try to visit some of my favorites regularly (though I wish more would have RSS feeds so I can track updates easier). One recently poses an interesting thought: Technology for What? A Preconceptual Sketch by Robert Heiny (http://tabletpceducation.blogspot.com/) I hate to say it, but having been involved with technology for more than 20 years, he has a point. He asks a series of questions, including:

Do teachers agree that increasing (or maximizing) student learning rates is our top daily priority?

What compelling ideal or practical purpose do state-of-the-art technologies serve in student learning?

Do some interests merely want the newest gismos in schools whether or not anyone needs them?

Which imperatives relevant to novice and scholarly learning drive technology evangelists to promote the use of new technologies, such as use of digital ink and wireless connections, to increase learning?

Heady questions, all. As a self-confessed tech evangelist, I’ve asked similar questions. If education existed, and thrived, in the pre-technological revolution era, why do we need technology now? What purpose does it serve? Is it necessary? The simple answer is no, education without technology can be done effectively, as generation after generation proved. One of the most compelling arguments to make in favor of technologically-enabled classrooms is that today’s students demand it. That is true, since many of these technologies were created before today’s students were born, which makes it part of the societal fabric of their lives. They don’t know life without cable, cell phones, or computers. It just IS.

But for me, as manager of an academic technology lab, the question moves more from having state-of-the-art to how we use those tools effectively, which I call state-of-the-use. When I wrote to the original RFP for a Center of Excellence grant for the Illinois Community College Board in 1992, the general feeling was that technology was important, but the question was ‘why?. The Centers of Excellence were charged with being the state models for technology in education. And I doubt that I, or likely any of my colleagues, knew exactly why we needed it. But we had a vision of the future, saw the potential for technology, and set out as if we were explorers of a vast, previously uncharted universe.

As a Center of Excellence, we worked to first define what constituted technological excellence. New hardware and software was delivered almost daily, all amazing and all very expensive. It made sense to give funds to a few to explore the options for the many. And explore we did. Within months of receiving the grant, I was plunged headlong into a world that I had never seen before. Laser disk programs sold for $ 5000 -10,000 per station. Computers cost that and more. Vendors came out of the woodwork trying to convince me that their software was the best of the best. We had any and all adult educational software as it became available. It was overwhelming for my staff of specialists, who were charged with making sense of it all.

Eventually, we returned back from the future to the common sense of the past. We had a meeting and I said listen, all of this is wonderful and amazing and exciting. But we are teachers. How will this make us better? More importantly, how will it make students learn more effectively? We came upon a series of realizations that we still employ in the Center today. First, technology is a tool. It’s like a book or a blackboard or a lecture. It’s nothing more than an additional tool that teachers can employ, when it is needed, and when it is most effective.

Second, teachers won’t use anything that is difficult to access. Change is common, but in education, comes slowly. The way to get teachers to use it is to take away all the layers of difficulty, and make it as easy to use as a book or a blackboard. When students had slates, they were used much as paper had been used in the past. When the first blackboard was put behind a teacher, suddenly the idea developed of using it to explain not to one student but an entire classroom of students. It may have been extremely low-tech, but it revolutionized how teachers teach. You need to think the same way when designing technology for a classroom. It absolutely has to be invisible to be effective. So we brainstormed on the problems teachers had with technology. We came up with solutions. For example, no instructor had the time or inclination to read 500 page software manuals. We determined that teachers needed to know how to get into, through and out of the software programs. We developed QuickNotes, which are one page (hard and fast rule) telling them how to get into, move through and exit the programs. The QuickNotes increased software usage almost 300% in the first 6 months.

Third, teachers need to see a reason to use the technology. We considered the various learning styles of our students and developed a series of Individual Educational Plans (IEP) for every level student who accessed the Center. Any student from any class program could come into the Center and learn what they needed when they needed it. We cross-correlated the software with the classroom curricula, so that students could have it correspond exactly with what they were currently learning and could choose various programs from the same skill sets that presented the information in a variety of learning styles. And teachers needed to only know the class level of the student to point them to the correct software sections. Teachers saw the value that technology offered their students. Student attendance jumped dramatically once they knew they could get the information they needed quickly and easily.

Finally, we determined the need for patience. As a more recent example, I started using blogs as the main communication tool for the Center a couple of years ago, replacing email and the mailbox stuffed with outdated memos. Blogs are archived, and searchable, and they don't clog up mailboxes. The information is there, when you need it and when you want it, and is available anywhere you have access to the Internet. The teachers took to using a blog slowly, but eventually, it became the tool I originally envisioned it being, once the value was established.

Technology for the sake of technology simply will not be used by teachers. They are too busy, and sometimes too reluctant to use something foreign and difficult to understand. But if you make the tool invisible, give it a purpose and a value, then new ideas can and will be embraced. We don’t need to have the newest state-of-the-art. We need to have the best state-of-the-use. We need to spend less money getting the newest and the best, and spend more on developing the uses of the equipment we do buy. Technology still in the virtual box is nothing more than a waste of resources. Get it out, and get it used.

Commentary: Sotir: KISS: Keep it Simple, Stupid

Stuck in the office on a cold and snowy day, I started pondering why the U. S., which has all but single-handedly created the technological revolution, has faltered so badly in getting academia to take the lead in developing it for the classroom. Certainly, there are a lot of creative, innovative people doing amazing things in many classrooms across the country. But the MAJORITY of educators just don't get it. They moved from the blackboard to the overhead projector, but many have been hit with a wall of complacency when new technologies burst on the scene. These are good people, with good intentions of providing quality education for their students. But the thought of using any new technology is resisted.
I'll give an example. The tablet PC has been around for a while. So has email. Teaching writing is difficult, and many teachers hate having to drag all the papers home to grade. Students hate to wait for a week to get the corrections to their papers, and see where they can improve. Let's put a tablet pc in the hands of that instructor. Let's assume that she has an open mind. Now let's have the students write their draft writing assignments on their computers, and put them in a Word document. At any time, day or night, weekend or holiday, when finished, they can email that Word doc to their instructor. At any time, day or night, weekend or holiday, whenever the instructor sits down to grade papers, those papers are right there on her tablet PC. She switches to the tablet, and opens up one of her students' assignments. She picks up the pen and makes the corrections, and then emails the document back to the student. The student, with any kind of computer, can see the comments and make the corrections, finish the final draft of the assignment and email it off to the instructor. That can be the end of it, or the instructor can open up the assignments in the classroom, and use them (with a projector) to help instruct the students to improve their writing through example.
There are also programs that, in a wireless classroom where all the students and instructor have tablets, can let each student correct sentences or rewrite paragraphs. The instructor sees all the reponses on her tablet, and can choose a few of the examples, show them to the class and further improve their understanding of what constitutes a good writing assignment. Since this is on a website, students can download and print any of the examples for themselves. So much easier than using a blackboard, and so much more advanced than using an overhead projector. Now, someone just needs to find that open minded instructor and get her the tools, and instruction on how to use them. And she has to be an evangelist for change, and a mentor to others who still fear new technologies. As the saying goes, try it, you just may like it.