The Literacy For Social Change Blog

21 Ways to Reach 21st Century Learners

Stephanie — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 15:06:59 +0000

This page http://21ideas.pbworks.com/ lists 21 ways to use new technologies in the classroom to engage adult learners and make learning more interactive and self-directed. Each of the items is a link to examples. For example, the item “Make flash cards for phones and iPods” links to instructions for how to put slides on a iPod, and also to a gallery of educational slides sets that you or your students can download to an iPod. Sets include flashcards to practice identifying the states, or a quiz on US Government. There is also a set of response cards. If all your students have an iPod, and they all download these response cards, then when you ask a question they can hold up their iPod with their response on it, such as the green Yes card, giving you another way to check comprehension or poll students.

Here are the first ten items. Visit the Web site to see the rest.

1 Contribute to a wiki
2 Read and write to a live blog
3 Collaborate using a Google spreadsheet
4 Bring YouTube into the classroom
5 Assign roving reporters
6 Students create podcasts
7 Create interactive maps
8 Create online quizzes
9 Connect to the world through Skype
10 Make flash cards for phones and iPods

ProLiteracy Activity in Washington D.C.

Stephanie — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 19:52:03 +0000

Yesterday President Obama announced the American Graduation Initiative — a $12 billion program over ten years that will provide more resources to community colleges for career pathways, including challenge grants to link these efforts with community partners and adult basic education and literacy programs. Some important details still need to be worked out between the White House and Congress, but this initiative has the potential to provide additional resources to ProLiteracy member programs like yours. In making the announcement, the President spoke to the need to “improve remedial and adult education programs, accelerating students’ progress and integrating developmental classes into academic and vocational classes.”

The announcement of this initiative comes after a series of consultation meetings were held with federal agencies and national organizations, including a meeting that ProLiteracy held with high-ranking White House officials. During the meeting, ProLiteracy presented a rationale for including adult basic education and literacy in the initiative, stressing the link between addressing adults with low-literacy levels and long-term, sustained, economic recovery, along with establishing career pathways for these adults. We also spoke to the specific role that community-based adult literacy programs can play in reaching adults with low literacy levels. Hours before the President’s announcement, ProLiteracy was included in a White House briefing conference call where we were assured that programs serving adult learners at the lowest literacy levels would have access to challenge grant money to partner with community colleges in developing programs that meet the needs of this particular population. We also were told that the Administration will “continue to work with the existing network of adult literacy providers.”

A copy of ProLiteracy’s press statement on this initiative is available on our Web site. For more information on the President’s speech and a description of the program, visit this link .

In the coming weeks, ProLiteracy will work with the Administration and Congress to further shape this initiative to ensure that the program is responsive to your concerns. If I or our team can answer any additional questions you may have about the American Graduation Initiative, please contact us. Meanwhile, I look forward to keeping you informed of how the final initiative takes form.

Thank you for all that you do for adult learners!

David C. Harvey
President/CEO
ProLiteracy

Urgent! Library Funding Cuts Proposed!

Stephanie — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 23:12:50 +0000

Governor Strickland proposes to fill Ohio’s $3.2 billion shortfall in the state budget by eliminating $200+ million from the Public Library Fund over the next two years. His proposal will have a drastic impact on all 251 public libraries in Ohio and on Columbus Metropolitan Library in particular. This proposal by the Governor cuts library funding by 50% beginning July 1, 2009.

We only have days to have an impact!

1. Today, contact your legislators. We have made it easy to do. Go to:

http://columbuslibrary.org

2. Call Governor Strickland’s office at (614) 466-3555.

The Governor’s proposed funding cuts come at a time when Ohio’s public libraries are experiencing unprecedented increases in demands for services. In every county throughout the state, Ohioans are turning to the library for free job help, children and teens are beginning summer reading programs, and people of all ages are turning to the library for information and assistance during the economic downturn. We cannot allow these cuts to succeed, cuts that will drastically reduce services and access. Please act now!

Important Advocacy Information-State of Ohio

Stephanie — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:28:00 +0000

From Rick McIntosh, OAACE Advocacy Director

To All Teachers, Administrators and Those in Support of Adult Basic Literacy Education (ABLE): Ohio

HB 1, the state budget bill, has passed the Ohio House and Senate and is now in Conference Committee. Currently the budget is projected to be $3 B short. Difficult decisions need to be made before July 1, 2009. This is a difficult and challenging time for our elected officials. They are going to have to make difficult decisions. With such a large budget deficit, no program is safe. Articles in the Columbus Dispatch and Cleveland Plain Dealer have both confirmed this and added that even if cuts result in a reduction in federal funds they will be considered. I am sure you are as concerned as I am about this.

Now is a time to stand up for ABLE funding and prevent additional cuts that will cripple an already underfunded system. In the latest conference committee report, ABLE will get an additional $225,000 cut while GED would get an additional $535,000 cut . Any additional cuts in ABLE funding will result in cuts in corresponding federal funding which means fewer adults will be able to earn their GED, move on to further education and training. Funding for GED testing has also been cut and we need to advocate for no additional cuts in that funding as well so that our students can have access to the GED test. OAACE is asking you to call your legislators and ask them to prioritize the needs of the poor and most vulnerable citizens in this State .

We are encouraging careful consideration of budget issues related to workforce and economic development and not limiting access to postsecondary education and training by further cutting funding to ABLE. Action Request: We must be heard and we must be heard in numbers. Please make sure you call and tell your colleagues, teachers, family, students, etc to urge your Ohio Representatives and State Senators to prioritize the needs of Ohio’s most vulnerable citizens. Urge them to speak with their colleagues on the conference committee and not include cuts for ABLE and GED.

For information on contacting your Legislators link to: http://www.legislature.state.oh.us Conference Committee Members House: Rep. Vernon Sykes, D-Akron; Rep. Jay Goyal, D-Mansfield; Rep. Ron Amstutz, R-Wooster Senate: Sen. John A. Carey Jr., R-Wellston; Sen. Mark Wagoner, R-Toledo; Sen. Dale Miller, D-Cleveland

High School Dropouts More Than Twice as Prone to Illness as College Grads, Study Finds

Stephanie — Sun, 24 May 2009 19:00:41 +0000

Posted May 6, 2009

WEDNESDAY, May 6 (HealthDay News) — American adults with the least education have the worst health, a new study finds.

Almost half of U.S. adults ages 25 to 74 reported being in less than very good health, and levels of health differ depending on level of education, according to a report released Wednesday by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Commission to Build a Healthier America.

For example, adults who didn’t graduate from high school were more than 2.5 times as likely to be in less than very good health as college graduates. Those who graduated high school but didn’t go to college were nearly twice as likely to be in less than very good health as college graduates. The new report added to the commission’s growing body of evidence that factors outside of the medical system play an important role in determining how healthy people are and even how long they will live.

“Access to affordable, high-quality medical care is essential, but that alone will not improve the health of Americans,” commission co-chair Alice M. Rivlin said in a Johnson Foundation news release.

“What this report tells us is that education has a tremendous impact on how long and how well we live. Policymakers need to focus on schools and education, as well as promoting healthier homes, communities and workplaces, to improve the health of our nation,” Rivlin said.

The report’s authors said it is the first to look at health and education on a state-by-state basis. Among its other findings:

45 percent of U.S. adults reported being in less than very good health. Rates vary widely between states, from a low of 35 percent in Vermont to a high of 53 percent in Mississippi.
Education-related differences in health can be seen within states. In Mississippi, nearly 75 percent of adults who hadn’t graduated from high school reported being in less than very good health, compared with 37 percent of college graduates. In Vermont, which had the best overall health in adults, 68 percent of adults who hadn’t finished high school said they were in less than very good health, compared with 22 percent of college graduates.
Overall, racial and ethnic minorities were more likely than whites to report being in less than very good health. Education-related differences in health were seen within every racial or ethnic group. For example, 44 percent of black college graduates in the United States said they were in less than very good health, compared with 55 percent of those with some college education, 62 percent of high school graduates, and 73 percent of those who didn’t finish high school.
California had the largest gap between the overall rate of less than very good health and the rate for college graduates. The study found that 48 percent of all adults in California said they were in less than very good health, compared with 28 percent of college graduates in the state. Delaware had the smallest difference, with 41 percent of all adults reporting being in less than very good health, compared with 32 percent of college graduates.

“Regardless of where your state falls in these rankings, the news isn’t good,” commission co-chair Mark McClellan said in the news release. “Education is an important marker for an array of opportunities that can lead to better health. One of the most important things we can do for our nation’s health is to improve education quality and educational attainment.”

The report authors also established a benchmark rate for adult health by looking at the best level of health achieved in any state among college graduates who also have healthy behaviors. The benchmark was found in Vermont, where less than very good health was reported by only 19 percent of college graduates who exercised and didn’t smoke.

A comparison of rates in every state against this benchmark shows that American adults at every education level and in every racial or ethnic group aren’t as healthy as they could be, the report authors said.

Little Progress on Adult Literacy

Stephanie — Sun, 24 May 2009 18:50:40 +0000

January 13, 2009 12:07 PM ET byJessica Calefeti

One in seven adults lacks the literacy skills required to read anything more complex than a children’s book, a staggering statistic that has not improved in more than 10 years, according to a federal study released last week.

The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy surveyed more than 18,500 Americans ages 16 and older and found about 14 percent could not read, could not understand text written in English, or could comprehend only basic, simple text. This study’s predecessor, 1992′s National Adult Literacy Survey, also found that about 14 percent of the 24,000 adults interviewed lacked moderate or advanced literacy skills. Because the overall population of the United States has grown by about 23 million adults, the number of adults with low literacy skills has grown by 3.6 million since 1992.

Unlike the earlier survey, the recently released study breaks down rates of literacy by state and even by county. Some states made significant progress in reducing their number of adult residents with low literacy skills. The number of adults with basic to no literacy skills in Alabama, for example, dropped from 21 percent in 1992 to 15 percent in 2003. But in several large states, including California, New York, Florida, and Nevada, the number of adults with low literacy skills rose, according to USA Today.

Another study released last week identifies the skills and types of instruction most effective in helping children up to age 5 develop a capacity to read. This knowledge, if attained at a young age, would reduce the number of illiterate adults in the future. The Report of the National Early Literacy Panel identifies skills like knowledge of the alphabet, ability to sound out certain parts of words, and ability to write one’s own name as crucial indicators of a child’s ability to master literacy later. The study (whose conclusions are based on a summary of leading early childhood education research) also found that reading books to children and enrolling them in preschool and kindergarten improve young children’s language development.

Brain Reads Word-by-Word

Stephanie — Sun, 10 May 2009 22:06:24 +0000

Research suggests words are seen as units and processed quickly

By Tina Hesman Saey

Web edition : Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

Reading may be fundamental, but how the brain gives meaning to letters on a page has been fundamentally a mystery. Two new studies fill in some details on how the brains of proficient readers handle words.

One of the studies, published in the April 30 Neuron, suggests that a visual-processing area of the brain recognizes common words as whole units. Another study, published online April 27 in PLoS ONE, reveals that the brain operates two fast parallel systems for reading, linking visual recognition of words to speech.

Maximilian Riesenhuber, a neuroscientist at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., wanted to know whether the brain reads words letter by letter or recognizes words as whole objects. He and his colleagues showed sets of real words or nonsense words to volunteers undergoing fMRI scans. The words differed in only one letter, such as “farm” and “form” and “soat” and “poat,” or were completely different, such as “farm” and “coat” or “poat” and “hime.”
The researchers were particularly interested in what happens in the visual word form area, or VWFA, an area on the left side of the brain just behind the ear that is involved in recognizing words.

Riesenhuber and his colleagues found that neurons in the VWFA respond strongly to changes in real words. Changing “farm” to “form,” for example, produced as profound a change in activity as changing “farm” to “coat,” the team reports in Neuron. The area responded incrementally to single-letter changes in made-up words.

The data suggests that readers grasp real words as whole objects, rather than focusing on letters or letter combinations. And as a reader’s exposure to a word increases, the brain comes to recognize the shape of the word. Meaning is assigned after recognition in the brain, Riesenhuber says.

The researchers don’t yet know how longer and less familiar words are recognized, or if the brain can be trained to recognize nonsense words as a unit.

That the brain recognizes words as a whole is “a feasible interpretation of their data,” says Kalanit Grill-Spector, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, “but there should be some caution.” The team doesn’t explain how the VWFA manages the feat, she says, and other theories in which the brain recognizes smaller units of two, three or more letters might account for the findings.

Piers Cornelissen, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of York in England, and his colleagues wanted to understand the whole sequence of events that occur in the brain during reading. Using a technique called magnetoencephalography, which measures magnetic fields created by electrical activity in neurons, the researchers pinpointed which parts of the brain are active when volunteers read words quietly to themselves. The technique allowed the researchers to time the activity down to the millisecond.

Some scientists have thought that the brain processes written words slowly, in “an increasingly complex hierarchy of processing, moving from squiggles on a page to meaning in your head,” Cornelissen says. But his study, in PLoS ONE, shows that words are processed quickly and involve direct connections between visual and speech-processing systems.

An area in the back of the brain that recognizes text was the first to respond, but then two other regions quickly activated. The VWFA and the region known as Broca’s area, involved in speech processing, became active within 15 milliseconds of the text recognition area when participants viewed words. But these areas did not activate when participants viewed pictures of faces and did not activate as quickly when they viewed strings of consonants.

Cornelissen thinks the results provide further evidence that the brain has two rapid reading pathways. The lexical route translates visual recognition of familiar words by the VWFA directly into meaning, he suggests. The sublexical route passes information through Broca’s area to the motor areas that control sound production. The second system would allow a person to work out unfamiliar or nonsense words by sounding them out in his or her head, he says.

The speed at which the VWFA becomes active supports the idea that the area recognizes whole words, Riesenhuber says. “It really argues for this being one shot to the system,” he says.

Great-Grandmother Named Literacy Tutor of the Year.

Stephanie — Sun, 10 May 2009 21:57:01 +0000

May 4, 2009

By RYAN PAGELOW rpagelow@scn1.com

Ann Hamlin, 75, of Lake Bluff has been named Tutor of the Year by the Literacy Volunteers of Illinois. (Thomas Delany Jr./News-Sun)

Victor Vargas, 18, of Waukegan wants to work in construction. But before he can get out of his temp job working in a pizza packaging factory and into a construction job, he needs a GED and a driver’s license. And before he can get a GED and pass a written test to get his driver’s license, he has to learn how to read.

Somehow he was passed up through the grades with his limited reading skills until he reached Waukegan High School. Never having graduated, he relies on his girlfriend to read things for him. But he’s trying to change that.

For the past year, he’s been going to the Adult Learning and Technology Center in Waukegan once a week for two hours to work on recognizing and sounding out syllables that make up words. “I just want to learn how to read. It sucks if you don’t know,” he said. He works one-on-one with volunteer tutor Ann Hamlin of Lake Bluff. Hamlin has volunteered one day a week as a tutor for more than 20 years, and in March she was named Tutor of the Year by the Literacy Volunteers of Illinois. Currently, Hamlin is tutoring four students, including Vargas. The others include a recovering drug and alcohol addict, a single mother and a 50-year-old who has a high school diploma and has worked for 30 years.

Hamlin, an avid reader and 75-year-old great-grandmother, got interested in helping adults learn to read after finding out the staggering number of adults who are illiterate.

About 13 percent of Lake County adults are unable to sign their own name or are unable to locate the expiration date on a driver’s license or total a bank deposit entry, according to a 2004 United Way of Lake County community needs assessment.

Hamlin works mostly with adults with very low-level reading skills who may also have learning disabilities. She mentioned one student she had for 11 years whose IQ was “off the wall,” but he couldn’t read because of dyslexia.

“Basically, what you’re doing for them is you’re creating self-esteem,” Hamlin said. “They feel that they can’t read, that they’re little people in society.”

Illiteracy can be tough financially on an adult because only low-skilled jobs are open to them, and they may also be in a co-dependent relationship with someone who reads for them. Many hide their illiteracy and develop coping skills to protect their secret.

“It takes tons of guts to come forward and learn how to read,” she said.

Since first volunteering as a tutor in 1987, she has had 32 students. One of them went on to take a course at the College of Lake County after a year and got an A in a criminal justice course, Hamlin said.

“When I started, there were no materials for adults. You had to take children’s materials and adapt them to adults. Now publishers are putting stuff out like crazy,” she said.

Hamlin, a retired cost price analyst for Army advertising contracts, plans to continue volunteering from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. one day a week as long as she can.

“When students catch on to something and look up at you and smile, you think, okay, I can keep doing this,” she said.

Tutor training

For more information about becoming a volunteer basic reading tutor, contact Barbara Babb at Waukegan Public Library at (847) 623-2041, ext. 222, or Laura Sherwood at the College of Lake County at (847) 543-2327.

To help someone learn to speak English, contact Sari Oosta at (847) 543-2317. There are about 100 volunteer tutors at more than 25 sites in Lake County, including libraries, churches, hospitals and the Lake County Jail.