skillsworkshop Blog

2012-01-11T13:23:47.253Z

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Hmm, I agree there does seem to be a discrepancy h...

2011-12-18T16:03:40.289Z

Hmm, I agree there does seem to be a discrepancy here Mango. I'm not sure what the pass rate is on the L1 and L2 tests but I think it's around 60% for L1 and even lower for L2?
The sooner everyone moves from Adult Numeracy to Functional Skills Maths the better as far as I'm concerned!

This passmark is 87%!. We have known several stud...

2011-12-18T12:44:13.825Z

This passmark is 87%!. We have known several students who could not pass this but on the next day passed a numeracy Level 1 test.

Yes I think my students would also learn best by p...

2011-04-14T11:33:46.879+01:00

Yes I think my students would also learn best by physically sorting cards, objects or maybe even chocolate bars! (See below)

By chance a Conservative canvasser knocked on my door two nights ago. He didn't manage to convert me (!) but we did have an interesting chat. He passed on a good idea about simulating AV by asking students to vote for their favourite chocolate bar.

Apparently people have been doing this at dinner parties. Of course, he was coming at it from the anti-AV angle: saying that if you use AV the chocolate bar that 'wins' is highly unlikely to be anyone's favourite.

I like the idea though and am going to adapt it for my group. I'm actually teaching them on May 5th so you can't get much more on-topic than that! It will also lead quite nicely into general data handling work on bar charts, tallies, surveys, etc.

In the meantime - has anyone got any ideas for something on the Royal Wedding for my lesson with the same group the week before? I'm toying with work on maps and directions - relating it to the wedding procession route and then coming up with our own routes around the college campus.... That's as far as my thoughts have got. Maybe I'll start a new blog post...

This video might make a fun start to the session:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/royal-wedding/8241761/Royal-Wedding-the-route-in-42-seconds.html

I used a Google presentation on it last year (think I may have got the link from here originally!)

I actually printed out and chopped up the slides so they could do it physically with sorting cards, making each person the 'counter' for one for the imaginary constituencies.

Finding out who'd 'won', then counting the overall cards for each. Worked fairly well -- some hiccups with inaccurate counting, as you'd expect but that made for good discussion anyway.

They put the results into a shared spreadsheet but you could do it almost as easily by hand.

Yes I'm still racking my brains as to what we ...

2011-04-12T14:26:27.370+01:00

Yes I'm still racking my brains as to what we could vote for to demonstrate the two methods clearly. Someone has suggested voting on where my students want to go for their end of term trip.

Whatever we vote on I'm also still thinking of the best way to deliver the "election"(at Entry Level). Some kind of kinaesthetic way where students move to different areas of the class room might work but would be better with larger numbers of learners. So maybe some kind of computer or PPT visualisation / model? (I'm hopeless with Excel but that might well be better).

That's lovely. I've been looking for an e...

2011-04-12T10:58:23.225+01:00

That's lovely. I've been looking for an easy to understand explanation of AV voting for my learners.

Also been trying to think of a suitable subject and way of modelling the voting to look at the different effects of First Past the Post vs AV.

We often do surveys in the group when working around referendum and voting topics, perhaps we'll try that with ranked preferences instead of favourites.

That an interesting post. I never thought about th...

2011-04-11T09:23:48.015+01:00

That an interesting post. I never thought about this before. But, looking back at different situations, this might be right. Keep it up friend!

Interesting pedagogy, I had never heard of Hilda T...

2010-08-26T17:11:54.643+01:00

Interesting pedagogy, I had never heard of Hilda Taba before.

On the ILT front, I've worked out how to get Wordle images so that they scale up nicely. You have to install two pieces of free software, PDFcreator and Inkscape.

You 'print' your wordle from the wordle web site as a PDF file. Then you import the resulting PDF into Inkscape, accept the defaults, and then save the result as a windows meta file (WMF).

That file can be inserted into PowerPoint or Word and you get smooth letter forms even if you print it at A0. I'm thinking of posters &c rather than handouts...

2010-08-19T07:24:57.174+01:00

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For a similar student wanting to take L2 Numeracy ...

2010-05-05T14:11:49.291+01:00

For a similar student wanting to take L2 Numeracy we found that reading the first question, then highlighting key words showed us that often there is a match first paragraph first question, second paragaph secon question etc, which can result in getting enough questions right to pass the exam. It also focussed us on the right bit of text so that when we recapped we went straight to the right bit of text to read.

More advanced learners could follow that up with s...

2010-04-26T13:16:11.754+01:00

More advanced learners could follow that up with some activites using the BBC Election Seat Calculator, which has the real statics built into it.

Both of those resources are lovely. I'd like ...

2010-04-19T15:12:43.476+01:00

Both of those resources are lovely. I'd like to use them in an exercise on "identifying the main points and ideas" of text and/or "listen and identify the main points of instructions", perhaps integrating with my IT class and having them convert the information into a PowerPoint, bulleting the main points from each section.

Perhaps do some supporting stuff to help them split it into "before the day" "on the day" "in the polling station".

The PDFs would print out nicely to be scribbled on and highlighted with coloured pens.

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2010-03-15T14:46:29.357Z

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Wordle is great resource for learning. I actualy ...

2010-02-22T13:48:17.959Z

Wordle is great resource for learning. I actualy use it with adult learners as a spelling tool and as a way to boost self-esteem by creating clouds of how the person feels they improved since they started coming to classes.

Yeah, I read this. It is a very interesting articl...

2010-02-22T13:44:51.089Z

Yeah, I read this. It is a very interesting article. I supose when children text they are automatically breaking down words in sounds...

There are so many fantastic web designers out ther...

2010-02-11T21:12:29.114Z

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2010-02-03T04:43:27.523Z

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2010-01-16T10:19:53.781Z

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Hi Maggie, congratulations on the Star awards.Well...

2010-01-12T13:02:25.496Z

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Hi, Breakfast Cereals - I just wanted to say how g...

2010-01-07T12:33:03.908Z

Hi, Breakfast Cereals - I just wanted to say how good John Kerrane's activity
L2breakfastcereals is. I've been working through it myself and see lots of scope for using long division, decimals and an understanding of percentages in it. Thanks so much, Anne Carlill