edna.edu.au

Thanks I have just started a blog and will use it that next term. The music has been interesting and the students have put the lyrics onto the wiki and commented on others and lyrics. Look forward to getting the blog up and running. Sue

What about blogging? For my course I have had to blog about what I have been learning, problems I have encountered and how I am going with the program. I also had to reply to the blogs of others. Sometimes our course facilitators would give us specific topics to address in our blogs. This has the learners engaged with another communication application, using the computer and analysing their learning. Hope this helps. Another option would be to post the lyrics to a song on your blog, and ask the students to comment on it, likes/dislikes, possible moral to the story, how the lyrics may be personally relevant, etc. Hope this helps.

I am interested in using technology with adult basic education students at TAFE. My students are currently making a wiki to present their research on music. Some very interesting classroom discussions have reulted from listening to student music choices and examining the lyrics.

I'm keen to find resources on supporting adult students (usually from China) with fossilised English. My students are taking a full-time course in another subject and I only have an hour, more or less, in a four-hour session per week to give them direct help with their English. The other three hours is taken up with helping them understand their core course notes and assignments. Any tips please?

That should have read: "My students are NOT all that keen to edit their work." (prior to Google Docs)

I am impressed with Google Docs for their use in the classroom from primary through to adult education. While it is only a simple word processing application, its primary purpose is for collaboration. Students can select collaborators (always including the teacher first) who then have permission to correct, comment, add. My students are all that keen to edit their work but peer-editing via Google Docs is a lot more fun. There is a "Teacher Crib Sheet for Docs" (pdf) available (it will come up when you search for it). This is a set of teacher notes to instruct a class in how to set up an account and how to use the main features. It's well worth the experiment to improve on peer-editing.