New Website for Minneapolis Public Schools Adult Education

Thanks to Nathan Syverson at Minneapolis ABE for sharing the following information:

Minneapolis Public Schools Adult Education has made a major update to its website and went live as of Thursday, July 14 2011. You can view the updated website at http://abe.mpls.k12.mn.us. This is a complete overhaul, featuring a new layout, a design refresh,  new content, and a reorganization of popular web resources.

Many readers of this blog use the following resources:

• The Online Activity List
• Bethany Gustafson's English for Work video series 
• MPS Adult Education's Touch Typing Curriculum.  

These can be found under the Students Section of the website.  There you can also find our Online Bookstore with a selection of books that we recommend to our ELL and GED students.

Also of note is our ABE Professionals section.  This is where we will post all of the materials we create that we wish to share with ABE and adult literacy professionals everywhere.  Do take a look from time to time, as it will be updated periodically.

Happy browsing!

Nathan Syverson

Minneapolis Public Schools Adult Education

"Your Disease Risk" Website

This is an interesting, free (and largely ad-free) interactive online tool that's accessible to adult learners with high intermediate reading skills.  It allows users to self-assess their risk for 5 major diseases (cancer, diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis, and stroke) that can be affected by prevention measures like a healthy diet and exercise.  To use the tool, you enter information about your height, weight, waist size (you might need a measuring tape for this one!), diet, exercise habits, smoking habits, etc.  When you're finished, you see results that give a rough risk-level assessment along with recommendations for ways you could reduce your risk.

You can find it here:  www.yourdiseaserisk.siteman.wustl.edu.

It would make a nice extension activity for learners who are working on a health unit, or as a resource for a health literacy curriculum.

If you try it, let me know what you think!

Learn English Online with Videos

Here's a sweet website for English learners who have access to broadband Internet (at home, school, or the library): www.englishcentral.com.

It features real video clips of all different genres - everything from President Obama taking questions from reporters to movie trailers and TV commercials to business speakers. Videos are organized topically by category, and also sorted into "easy," "medium," or "hard," categories so learners can choose material that is appropriate to their level and interests.

Learners are prompted to record themselves repeating the audio from the video clips, so using this site does require that learners have access to headphones with a microphone.

It's free to use, though users must complete a brief registration form with an email address.

If you try it with your learners, let me know how they like it!

Video Annotation

Do you use videos for distance learning or self-study materials? If so, take a look at this tool from the University of MN called Video Ant.

Video Ant is a free flash-based tool for annotating videos with markers set on a timeline matched to text comments. The comments appear in a panel next to the video, and the viewer can jump to different portions of the video by clicking on the text comments.

English for Work Interactive Goes Online

The English for Work Interactive Video Series, created by former MLC - Arlington Hills Learning Center teacher Bethany Gustafson, was designed to give students the vocabulary and language to succeed at work they were already doing in the hopes this would help prepare them for supervisory positions. Previously only available on a Windows-Compatible CD-ROM, the videos and accompanying lesson planning aids are now available for download and on-demand streaming on the Minneapolis ABE web server.

Their new home on the web is: https://abeweb.mpls.k12.mn.us/english-for-work/.

The English for Work videos and accompanying materials were developed through a Minnesota Literacy Council technology curriculum mini-grant. For more information on the technology mini-grants, including links to other FREE materials and updates about this year's projects, go to: www.theMLC.org/techgrants.

Minneapolis' ABE Online Activity List has Moved

If you were a fan of the Minneapolis ABE Online Activity List (abeonline.mpls.k12.mn.us) I'm sure you have discovered that it's gone!

The content, however, has not disappeared forever. It is being reorganized and republished on a new site: http://abeonline.mpls.k12.mn.us.

As my friend Nathan at Minneapolis ABE said in his FaceBook announcement:

You may have used our on line activity list in the past. In fact, it is our number one hit on google. (http://www.google.com/search?q=Minneapolis+ABE)
It is a wonderful resource, but has been a behemoth to maintain. In fact, I don't believe it has been updated since 2007. We are testing an itty bitty page driven by an itty bitty database, that will hopefully be easier to update and maintain. Take a look: http://abeweb.mpls.k12.mn.us, and feel free to give feed back [there], or on the FaceBook group page.

So please update your Favorites/Bookmarks and keep the online learning going!

Online Exercise Makers from CLA Language Center

These little tools have been around for quite a while, but I have to admit that I had forgotten about them until a couple days ago, when a colleague asked me if there was a better way to make a matching exercise for her online training (the one in the CMS wasn't very pretty). I snooped around my bookmarks and rediscovered these online exercise makers from the CLA Language Center at the University of Minnesota.

There are only three tools, and they have their limitations, but they are FREE, and they are easy to use. The first allows you to make "glossed" web pages - so learners can click on a hyperlinked word to see information about it (whatever extra information you have provided in the 'gloss'), the second allows you to create self-check learning activities (you can embed audio or video, which is nice), and the third to create drag-and-drop matching exercises (including matching to an image).

Once you've made your exercises, you save them as .html files, then share the files with learners through a website or course management system. If you're teaching online, they can make a nice supplement to other online teaching tools.

Check them out at: http://languagecenter.cla.umn.edu/index.php?page=makers.

Creating with CLEAR

CLEAR (the Center for Language Education and Research, based at Michigan State Univ.) has a number of sleek, easy-to-use online language teaching tools. Most allow you to build speaking and listening activities for your students - a real rarity among teacher-friendly tools for building online activities. There is also a nice process-writing service for writing teachers called "Revisions".

Teachers can sign up for a free account to build activities. Students can work on those activities without an account (except for the Revisions service, which they do need to register for and be added to their teacher's class). Teachers will need someplace to place their activities for students to access them. That could be a blog like this one, a class wiki page, or a standard web site.

Here is one very simple example: the Audio Dropbox. Intended as a place for students to "drop off" speaking assignments (like they might drop a writing assignment in your mailbox), the audio dropbox takes about 5 minutes to build and embed in a web page. Please feel free to leave me a comment.



Check them out at: clear.msu.edu/clear.
And thanks to Barry Bakin for posting about CLEAR and leading me to their stash of goodies!