Monthly Archives: February 2015

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ALaN WA Newsletter – February 2015

Welcome to edition 16 of the Adult Literacy and Numeracy Network of Western Australia Newsletter!

Views expressed by contributors to the newsletter are their own and, unless expressly stated, do not reflect the opinions of their employers/organisations.

This contents page links individually to each article enabling you to go immediately to those of your choice. Alternatively, if you go to the main blog link, you can access the articles by scrolling down the page.

We welcome your comments and contributions to our newsletter. If you are an Adult Literacy/Numeracy practitioner in Western Australia or indeed, anywhere in the world, we invite you to subscribe and comment. If you are interested in joining the GoogleGroup for our network, please visit our “How to join” page and complete the online form.

This is our first newsletter for 2015. We hope you all had a great break and we look forward to sharing again this year.

Contents

1. Collaborative numeracy program Take 2

2. Professional learning coming up in WA

3. CAVSS local leaders project

4. Digital literacy for “offline” students

5. Conferences in 2015

 

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Collaborative Numeracy program Take 2

Beth Marr will be returning to Western Australia in late February to start a second set of workshops developing teacher’s skills to apply collaborative learning techniques to adults learning numeracy.

The 2014 pilot program will form the basis for  a series of videos.   Whether you need to refresh your skills and re-visit the concepts, or start learning about the ideas from scratch, the videos will allow you to do this in your own time and place. Sorry, but 2015 program participants will not get the chance to be in a video!

I would love to hear from anyone who has tried some of the models of activity that Beth taught us last year – you can comment here publicly so the whole world can see if they wish or, if you prefer,  in our membership-only ALaN Network Google Group.

More of Beth’s work is available at “Building Strength With Numeracy” on the VALBEC website.

Let me know if you missed out on a place in the program. There are still a couple of spots available.

 

Cheryl Wiltshire

ALaN Network WA

 

 

 

 

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Professional learning coming up in WA

Introduction to Certificates in General Education for Adults (CGEA)

This induction program for new CGEA teachers is scheduled on Wednesdays in 2015 (11 March and 12 August).

Teach Me Grammar 2015

A new program for Teach Me Grammar will start in July. If you are interested in Teach Me Grammar, checkout the GoogleGroup or visit Teach Me Grammar Program 2015 to get more information and the application form of the previous program.

Collaborative numeracy: working together to build numeracy skills in adults

Collaborative numeracy: working together to build numeracy skills in adults is a program of  professional development for teaching numeracy to adults and young people in vocational training  and other adult learning contexts.

Program starts 26th February 2015. Any late applications as soon as possible please. Contact Cheryl.Wiltshire@dtwd.wa.gov.au 

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CAVSS Local Leaders Network Project

This is an ALaN Network project funded by the WA Department of Training and Workforce Development and being carried out by C Y O’Connor Institute.

The aim of the project is to create an online “course” providing information and scenarios for decision making about using CAVSS, promoting greater understanding of the CAVSS Business Rules for all managers.

Two on-line surveys, one for CAVSS managers and one for CAVSS lecturers, have been conducted and responses analysed. Responses to these survey have helped us identify the skills and knowledge that are key to undertaking the CAVSS Manager’s job

The surveys show areas of concern that can be grouped under three main issues:

  • Expecting that CAVSS will solve every problem
  • Lack of systematic process to ensure that team-teaching model is set up and then monitored
  • Failure to understand and value the skills and knowledge profile of the literacy/numeracy teacher.

CAVSS Business Rules that are most difficult to comply with are graphed below. Rule 13, Selecting teachers to deliver CAVSS, being the most difficult.

Bus Rules Graph

The surveys show we need to highlight the importance of having the right teacher… not just another vocational lecturer.

The development of the on-line course is well underway and will be trialled before launching. We are creating the course with Articulate Storyline – a rapid e-learning development tool.

Coursepics

With this tool we can create interactive content using quizzes and scenarios as well as a variety of images, video, text and audio.

Lina Zampichelli

 

 

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Digital literacy for “offline” students – Part 1

Worried about how to incorporate digital literacy in your literacy course if your students have no, or limited, Internet access? There are downloadable tools that you can use to help you with this. Most need to be installed on the computers your students use although some may be run from a USB memory stick or a CD/DVD. This article focuses on PowerPoint as a tool for creating digital texts.

The maths resource “Language of shape” on this blog page, was developed in PowerPoint. It is a digital text containing internal hyperlinks and audio so that it has a degree of interactivity. The links below connect to short “how to” tutorials on creating different interactive texts using PowerPoint:

Some ideas for student tasks that create digital texts using PowerPoint advanced features.

Wordle ideas for Ppt projects

There are a number of other tools that may be used to create digital texts without being connected to the Internet, however PowerPoint is probably the most easily available in most teaching contexts.

Jo Hart

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Conferences in 2015

WA Adult Literacy Council 2015 State Conference at Central Institute of Technology on 16th and 17th April, 2015. The conference is titled Great Expectations: literacy, the individual and the economy.

The 25th biennial conference Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers (AAMT) will be held 6–8 July 2015 in Adelaide, SA. The theme is “Mathematics: Learn, Lead, Link”

ACER Research Conference 2015 – Learning assessments: Designing the future. 16-18 August, Crown, Southbank, Melbourne
A conference to connect  teachers, education leaders and policy makers with the latest assessment research to inform teaching and learning.

ACAL National conference 2015 – Resilience, Risk, Preservation – held held at the Adelaide Zoo in  Adelaide on 24th and 25th September 2015.