For a second year the Adult Migrant English Program at CIT has received some funds to undertake a LearnScope/Innovative Learning Project. Last year the main focus was to learn about flexible learning and WebCT, to develop a web site and to develop teaching materials and learn how to put them on WebCT. These materials were produced in Dreamweaver, Word, PowerPoint and also Hot Potatoes.

This year we decided to develop our PowerPoint skills to produce quality teaching materials for our pre-literacy and beginner students. Most of the available computer materials are too dense for the pre-literacy students. Remember some of these students have never been to school and never held a pen. Some are grandparents although others are quite young but most have suffered trauma in their country. It was quite a challenge to find something suitable for these students but PowerPoint could provide visuals, sound and text. By using hyperlinks between slides, small interactive activities could be developed and students could self correct and spend as much time as they wished practising their pronunciation, testing themselves and learning the connection between picture, sound and text. The chosen vocabulary could be illustrated with pictures from the digital camera which gave added meaning and motivation to the exercises. For most of the students it’s easier to click than write but the PowerPoint slides lend themselves to becoming work sheets for homework.

The slide below (in part b of a lesson on hobbies) gives the students the opportunity to listen to the question and the introductory words by clicking on the speaker symbol. They then look at the picture and click their answer. If they click “sewing”, they hear: “no not sewing”. By clicking “gardening” they hear: “Yes, that’s right, I like gardening”.

The slide on the right comes from a learning presentation with lots of listening and pronunciation work as well as visuals and text.

The beginner students are required to read and understand recounts, follow instructions etc. By taking the digital camera on excursions we were able to write recounts and illustrate excursions, holidays etc. Class activities such as making jam and making pancakes were photographed in class and then used in a presentation. The slide show was advanced by students giving the correct answer to a question, or finding the correct word to complete a sentence. The addition of sound helped students practise their listening and speaking skills. I have illustrated the first and last slide of our Public Education Day Presentation. By clicking public in the first slide the presentation moves on. Nothing happens if you click private. If they click boring on the last slide they will hear: “No, it was an interesting day!”

It was a workshop with Dorothy Waterhouse which showed us some of the potential of PowerPoint as a teaching/learning tool way beyond its use as the ubiquitous accompaniment of every presentation. Using her tutorials and lots of experimentation we had both produced a series of PowerPoint presentations for our classes when we learned about an on-line/CD course on Digital Coaching Aids, run by Marcus Ragus from the Institute of TAFE Tasmania. As part of the learning component of LearnScope we have both enrolled and are now looking at examples of DCA’s (i.e. educational/learning PowerPoint presentations) developed in Australia and overseas. These show some very sophisticated presentations with links to Internet sites to allow problem-

solving activities which could be useful at higher levels. There are also some interesting discussions on the best way to cope with the size of PowerPoints and make them freely available to students. At the moment we are generally saving our work on CDs or USB drives or a local drive because it is sometimes difficult to retain the integrity of PowerPoint in WebCT. We hope that the course and exchange of ideas with other teachers will give us further ideas and skills.

By Jill Schaefer and Alex Dodgson, teachers AMEP, CIT