ESOL resources and other matters

The other day I received the following message:

Hello William

There was at our last staff meeting a mention of on-line resources for ESOL and we were reminded of the work that you have been doing.

Would you be prepared to give the School of Foundation Learning an update on your work at our next staff meeting, 5 May?

If so, I'll book a room with a data projector etc.

Many thanks,

Marc

And so today, the 5th, I'd better decide what to cover! I've blocked myself and hour or two out to prepare. I'll do so via this blog interface - I find it easier to draft on a keyboard, and it leaves a permanent record that others (you) can readily access. That's assuming that I' actually have pearls of wisdom to offer. I'm just not too sure how a data projector operates . . .

Being a visual learner, I quickly sketched out/brainstormed a plan on a piece of paper (recycled of course). Three arrows radiate out from the centre, so there are to be three sections in this presentation:

1. The nature of my (ESOL-related) work
2. The online tools that I use
3. Links to my ESOL resources

To me the Internet is like a fabulous, gigantic toy shop. There's a ton of stuff out there. Some of it is useful, some is not. It is half-pie organized, so if you know what you're doing you can find what you're after. However it all takes time. It is all too easy to get distracted. Sometimes you wonder how permanent or not it is, and whether it is worth investing the time and the effort to become conversant. And for certain people - and I include myself - its unstructured nature and technical gobbledy-gook is stressful to negotiate.

For me it would help if management acknowledged the input that is required for people to get up to speed (the same way that we know that hundreds of hours of English practice are required to raise the IELTS score by a single point). If a training programme along the same lines as fire warden, Jasper instruction, first aid, Treaty of Waitangi and computer safety was made compulsory, then that would develop a stronger collegiate network where everyone feels they are working in tandem. It is awfully hard for a small number of individuals to push against resistance using their own time and energies. There needs to be a concerted approach.

There now, that's my rant over!

What am I doing in terms of ESOL-related Learning Centre business? Three things:

1. One hour a week I see a group of four NESB students enrolled in Foundation Studies. We look at the skills that are needed to do their classwork well, and I often look up sites that they can refer to. I often find a link by searching another of my blogs.
2. I see Pariya's AM3 once a week for an hour (Mondays 11-12, H513). The level three students practice their listening, grammar, reading, writing - even conversation, at a different website each time. I try to write up what they will be doing for the day here.
3. Finally, whenever I come across a website that may be interesting or useful I make a record of it. It is most important to do that, otherwise it is swallowed by the ether! There are various ways of doing this, and they vary in terms of their effectiveness.

Let's say I search on Google right now for a good site - you know how to do that I presume. I'll enter the words 'interesting', 'ESL', 'news' and 'reading'. I'll be a couple of minutes . . .

I was wrong - it took me all of 10 seconds. Google provided me a list of just over 200,000 sites, and the very top one looks interesting because of its organization. I recognized the word concordancing, software, strategies and extensive reading. It looks like winner, right? And I'm going to give it to you for nothing. Ready?

Here it comes now . . . http://academics.smcvt.edu/cbauer-ramazani/Links/esl_reading.htm

Did you write it down? Are you sure you every one of those 63 letters and symbols correct? Your spelling skills won't work here. Make sure your capitals and lower case letters aren't confused. Is that a 'one', and 'el' or a capital 'eye'. Only one will do. Could you be bothered always having to type it in? Are you going to dictate it for your students, or write it out on the white board . . . when you run out of room and have to break the string in two. "Please, teacher, is there are gap?"

Isn't it easier just to click here?

Since you can't click on paper, you'll need to come get to grips with the technology. An easier way of remembering the web address is by saving it as a favourite or bookmark. However, you may soon accumulate too long a list. Also, these links are only available on the one computer. What if you wanted to work from home, or if the computer crashes or is replaced?

A good alternative is to use the social bookmarking web service called Delicious. Here Wikipedia tells you about it. I use it, and here are my bookmarks. I can access them from any (Internet-connected) computer, and so can you. As I write, I have 344 websites bookmarked on many topics of interest. I can search my own bookmarks. Type in the word English and 48 sites will appear. You can click on the site from the title. You can see who else has saved that site (and get an idea of its popularity). Here is Marc's Delicious list. He is part of my network. With a little luck you will find someone who had already saved all of the sorts of sites that you are interested in and simply import them!

As well as 'tagging' sites with keywords to help you find them again, you can tag the posts in your blog (or search your entire blog for a keyword). For instance, I remember that last year I used a good site but I can't remember exactly. It was about grammar, but if I search for that work I will get a lot of hits! Luckily I remember that it had the word zone in the title. I search using that word and these are the two 'hits'. Success!

Now, if all of us join up to Delicious and agree to tag good websites to do with ESOL using a common tag, say tekotagolangauges then all those sites will come up if we search Delicious for that tag. Collaboratively we can build up a fantastic resource!

This is just scratching the surface.

p.s. News just to hand: I was unable to be with Pariya's AM3 class today, so I quickly posted them something to read on my blog. Without being asked or prompted, 6 of them left comments on that post! Incredible!