Adult Learners in Conversation – “A Fuller Sense of Self”

Last night Tricia Bowen spoke about her experience of reconnecting with the adult learners who have shared their stories in this volume. I talked about how great it was to join with Tricia and Lynne in the whole creative and collaborative process of editing. Then Lynne Matheson invited us to launch the video into the world, so we all made rocket-launching sounds, and the champagne flowed. * It was such a good experience filming and editing these stories with Tricia. I would love to hear any feedback, especially related to Read More …

PageTurners has a new online shop

Just sent out the latest PageTurners newsletter, letting people know that the new shopping-cart style website is up and running!! It’s taken me much time this year to get the site all updated and e-commercey, so i’m very happy that we’ve finally launched. Woot. You can read the newsletter here. Take a look at the site, tell us what you think. Oh, we need a feedback form don’t we. If you’re not subscribed to the PageTurners email list, you can join via the website.

iPad apps especially for Seniors??

I wondered if there are any iPad apps that would be especially useful for people over 55, so i searched the web for  “best apps for ipad for seniors“. Sure enough, there are many many lists: “16 helpful apps for seniors”, “27 bet iPad and iPhone apps for senior citizens”. But are any of them useful.. and how many of these apps are FREE..? Well, some of them are designed to help people by improving things like: Visual accessibility: Silver Surf is a web browser with “large navigation buttons, dynamic text Read More …

PageTurners has now launched series 7

Very exciting news – PRACE PageTurners has just launched its 7th series of books for adult learners, and we’re about to launch a new shopping-cart style website as well.. stay tuned! Some great stories in this collection, about a missing dog, a woman who crosses the world to realise her dreams, a mysterious car crash in the desert, and a drink machine that seems to have evil intentions.

Q&A session at Spring St Campus – many many questions!!

So, the session we had at Spring St was more chaotic than the one we had at Reservoir Neighbourhood House. Again, we started with brainstorming questions, but this time we dived straight into responding before the full list had built up. 06 May at Spring Street Airdrop – what is it and how does it work? Much of this session focussed on Airdrop, as many of you wanted to experiment and get hands-on with it. We tested out sending photos and documents from one iPad to another. How do we Read More …

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 Read More …

Video interview with Sia Gazis

Fiona introduced Sia and Michael, and suggested they create an interview-style promotion together for the introductory massage course. Using some footage and photography shot by Lauren, Michael shot and edited 15-20 minutes of additional footage down to 4 minutes. The editing was done in a free, professional-grade software called Lightworks (free for a mildly limited version). There’s a learning curve, of course, but michael would definitely recommend this software to anyone who doesn’t have access to iMovie. If you have iMovie.. use that instead. Future suggestions: Any teachers who are interested Read More …

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 Read More …