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 …

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 …

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. Read More …