Series 5 Equity Toolbox - Language, Literacy & Numeracy

This resource is based on a discussion that took place between 12 - 23 July 2004 to celebrate the launch of the Series 5 Equity Toolbox – Language, Literacy & Numeracy (Where’s the party at?). This Equity Toolbox can offer a range of innovative teaching and learning strategies to support young learners. The discussion was hosted by the people who created the toolbox: Roe Mass, Damian O’Sullivan, Julia Kearton and Libby Reid -  and designed and moderated by the inimitable Louise Housden.

“Where’s the party at?” is an online resource to support the development of reading, writing, numeracy and general skills for youth literacy learners. “Where’s the party at?” presents a range of youth centred interactive learning activities. These activities are exciting, colourful and engaging, and embed the literacy and numeracy learning in a relevant context.

Typically, this learner group has been difficult to engage and keep on task for extended periods of time. Feedback from practitioners in this field shows a preference for short units of work and supporting materials that can be “dipped into” and customised to suit the interests of the learners. Because of this, the activities in “Where’s the party at?” have been designed so that they can be delivered in short snappy blocks.

Unlike many resources for this target group, the learning activities in “Where’s the party at?” are, on the whole, quite explicit. They have been designed to ensure that the opportunity to really enhance literacy and numeracy skills is given to this learner group, rather than relying totally on incidental learning simply through exposure to engaging activities.

Key Features

The activities in “Where’s the party at?” provide a wide range of reading, writing and numeracy experiences, and include general skills tasks that are based on developing the Mayer competencies (in CGEA, these are GCO competencies). “Where’s the party at?” offers support for students who may encounter difficulty with the tasks along the way. The activities and content are customisable enabling the Toolbox to meet the needs of a broad range of learners.

The topics are particularly significant for the target group. The activities not only develop literacy and numeracy skills, but deal in a realistic way with the ‘personal risk-management’ issues that these learners can face at this stage of their lives. 

 

The demand for online resources for youth literacy learners is increasing because of the growth of post-compulsory school age learners in non-school environments. Many young learners who attempt prevocational/ vocational courses delivered in registered training organisations are found to have gaps in their literacy/ numeracy skills.

Providers need to have flexibility in delivering literacy and numeracy training via a range of both online and traditional resources - this applies particularly to situations where providers run dedicated youth literacy programs or where they have a few youth learners in a mixed-age group. The online delivery platform is particularly suited to many of these learners because they have often been immersed in technology through school and leisure activities.

We have used bits and pieces of the toolbox very successfully with adult learners and intend to use it extensively with VCAL students as well as our younger CGEA students.

 

Summary of Discussion

Comments about the Toolbox

I will be encouraging my youth staff to look at the product and consider its potential use with VCAL students.

I have 'tested' the toolbox on my 15 year old daughter. It has been a great discussion starter for us to talk about drugs, alcohol and peer pressure. We had an interesting time working through the different choices in the rage party scenario. I also recently demonstrated the toolbox to a senior studies teacher who plans to use it with her Food Prep class. Her comment: 'Much more interesting way of teaching the healthy food pyramid and other facts about nutrition than the way I teach it now. The students will have fun with this.'

We're working on a youth action learning project in the NSW Northern Rivers this year so I'll be keen to try the Toolbox out with our young CGEA students.

As a high school teacher of 13 to 17 yr olds, I believe this wonderful resource has a big future.

I checked it out late last week... the activities hone in on subjects that our youth would relate too... I work with a combined class of mature adults & youth so this will be great to encourage my late teens to read and write!
They’re tricky subjects and you have handled them well. The CGEA is such a great program to work with - and you have made it so relevant. I will be looking at adapting it to the modules I teach in TAFE NSW after I contact our Section head to buy it!!

I have some mature students and they worked happily through some of the maths units in the Toolbox. The content does need to be adapted for this group, but the topics prompted lots of ongoing discussions

I expect that this resource would be fabulous to re-engage those younger learners in the VCAL program. But I suspect that it would have great appeal to some older learners too - an excellent PD tool to re-engage teachers in the concepts of elearning.

The development story

Question: What were your biggest challenges as Instructional Designer? What were the main lessons for you?

Answer: Challenges included balancing the conflicting needs and desires of the target audience, interpreting the writers’ content and their image of how it should be presented on screen with the limitations imposed by the budget and other technical requirements of the Toolbox. It was not only important to choose activities that would engage youth, but also those that gave educational value for dollar. Our target audience are typically accustomed to technically rich online experiences so movement, sound and colour were important. We wanted to add as much audio as the budget would allow because of the difficulty some learners experience.

Another challenge was to present information in small blocks, so that the task of reading was not too much of a “turn off”. Sebastian’s activity cards were great for this. Audio, rollovers and weaving questions into activities that contained longer texts were other techniques.

There were just so many great ideas coming from the writers! We chose topics that could be woven together to satisfy particular Literacy/ Numeracy competencies. Sebastian is a “Flash Wizard” We aimed at choosing Flash activities that could be programmed and then re-used in other contexts. But it was a challenge to choose activities not just to engage but to develop skills, stimulate discussion and be fun to do!

The biggest challenge was to design for the youth audience. The literacy, numeracy and technical skills of any youth group are often diverse. We needed layers of scaffolding (where practical) to support those who needed extra guidance, whilst also making assessment tasks accessible for "fast trackers." Thus the assessment tasks appear on separate CDs.
Another challenge was to have activities that developed specific skills and also activities that were more open ended giving learners a chance to direct their learning. The general tasks scattered throughout the resource are examples of more open ended tasks. These also allow scope for the classroom teacher to adapt the task to the group or the environment.

From Libby:  This "toolbox" concept was difficult to get my head around. It was much bigger in size and far more complex than my previous work. WTPA was realms beyond my technical skill. WTPA was designed and coded through the wizardry of Finpa.

It took time for me to get a clear idea of my role in the project. Early on, I assisted the content team to take activities that had engaged the youth in face to face situations and develop these into online activities. The content team were the experts in what "worked" with youth, in the style of language, the look and the feel that might appeal. They in turn constantly sought feedback from the coalface - the youth they taught on a day to day basis.

My role developed and took on aspects of Instructional Design. I became a link between the writers and the Finpa team. Developing the flow of activities, checking on competencies, ensuring the activities were based on a solid educational foundation, developing the flow of activities with each CD, requesting and negotiating on the interactions that Finpa coded.

From Julia: I lead a team of fantastic youth teachers at Swinburne TAFE and with three of them, Marina, Craig and Gill, and also Libby our online leader, we wrote the “Where’s the party at?” toolbox. Libby had previously worked on 2 smaller online youth resource projects, and I’d worked on a very primitive online project, many years ago, so this Toolbox was a terrific PD experience for each one of us. Marina, Craig and Gill are amazingly energetic and creative teachers who really know how to engage this learner group in the classroom and we relied heavily on their finger on the pulse knowledge of what turns on and for that matter, what turns off this group.

Once we’d settled on the personal development/ risk-management content for the toolbox, our challenge was to try to rein in the number of topics we wanted to cover, ensuring that it remained first and foremost a reading, writing, numeracy and general skill development resource. We were particularly keen to see that the resource contained lots of overt teaching and learning activities, rather than the more ‘hit and miss’ approach of relying on incidental learning occurring simply through exposure to engaging activities. Knowing how much Gen Y like to vote people off the island, out of the house etc, we also tried to provide plenty of open-ended learning activities and choices for the learner.

Question and Answer session

Question: If you had five minutes to show this product to someone new to toolboxes (picture a sceptical literacy and numeracy teacher desperate for a resource but not too sure about having the time to learn how to use the technology) what bit would you show them for pure, initial WOW appeal? From a shamelessly subjective point of view - what's your favourite bit?

• Answers
  I really like the way Lounge room/ Smoking/ Smokefacts guides the learners through a factual piece. It reveals the text in small slabs and maintains interest because the learners are asked to predict what comes next in the text. These are probably not the WOW bits technically. But I like them because I often feel like I need to show reluctant "onliners" that the Toolbox does provide opportunities for learning and stimulating the "grey matter".   It's short and I think would get some discussion happening.
  
• As I teach Numeracy, I have a soft spot for Love and Marriage, which explains line graphs(Bedroom Relationships). Smokin' habits and numbers - for simple analysis of survey results and a visual interpretation of mean, median and mode.
  
• I like the Gonorrhea report that I found whilst browsing - good rollovers of topic sentences in a report.

Question: Can you tell us about Finpa please?

Answer: Finpa programmed the resource. FinPa New Media was started by former Swinburne Industry Training Consultants. They have produced lots of work for RTOs and corporates. Their focus is the education and training market.

Question: Can you provide an insight on learning objects with this toolbox? I can see lots of potential.

Answer: This is not a SCORM compliant product. However, it is set up in such a way that each flash interaction can be "lifted" out of the toolbox. It does require that you also take the shared assets folder as well. This is all explained in the technical guide documentation. Let me know if you would like more info re SCORM compliance and I will post this for you.

Question: A group were using a Community access centre and found that whenever one user accessed this toolbox from the flexible learning website, internet access for the rest of the computers just slowed and stopped. This is obviously a bandwidth issue with the centre but it did make me wonder about how a home user with a low-end connection speed and hardware might go with such a multimedia rich Toolbox.

Answer:  Flash is as good as it gets for rich media on low bandwidth. Voice added substantially to the file size but it was deemed necessary for the target audience. Flash is an amazing development tool that uses vector graphics and we build "lean" files by optimising the vectors and using lots of code (actionscript). However, for very low bandwidth users is it a bit like getting an elephant through a key hole.

One option for preparing classrooms for use is to have already clicked into the interactions you will be using – this means they will already be loaded. Depending on your browser and the temporary file settings (and how often you are accessing) you can get very quick responses from Flash if the file is sitting on your local machine (in temp internet files).

Question: Would this Toolbox fit well within any online learning environment?

Answer: The Toolbox has been developed to fit within any online learning environment. We have tested it in WebCT. We have tested the discussion board links and that all worked OK.

Question: Could this Toolbox be adapted to run on a PDA?

Answer: Flash interactivity is OK on a PDA, however the common resolution/ screen size of a PDA is 320px X 240px. We have developed the Flash components for 800px X 600px. Adapting the current activities would take some work.

Key Resources:

Where's the Party At? Toolbox  - http://flexiblelearning.net.au/toolbox/series5/519.htm

Contributors

Melanie Burke, Vivian Evans, Chris Froissard, Lindy Herbert, Louise Housden, Robyn Jay, Ken Johnson, Julia Kearton, Roe Maas, Carole McCulloch, Denise Morgan, Steve Omant, Damian O'Sullivan, Lyndall Owbridge, Douglas Purcell, Libby Reid, Peter Robertson, Debbie Soccio, Marie Zuvich