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The Skills for Life Living Documentation Project (S4L/LDP)

By: Peter Rudin-Burgess

As a teacher I work with individuals or very small groups of students. When I am planning my lessons I can often spend hours trying to find a suitable activity for the student or students to work on. I may have a list of good websites or online games, but you need to check each one to make sure it still exists before you can list it as a learning activity. I may have a good activity but it may not suit the individual students learning style. For whatever reason I and all my colleagues can spend a lot of time seeking out online resources.

You may already know from experience, or can simply imagine, how many lists there are online of good websites or resources. In fact there are so many now that there are lists of lists of really good resources. This would appear to solve the problem. If I cannot find one of my own favourite websites, just look on one of these lists for something, check it out and away you go! Fine in principle but doesn’t work in practice. These lists say things like “xxx website – really good for fractions” or “nice shopping activity” sometimes you may get a whole two sentences describing the site or activity. If the descriptions were any larger any list with more than 10 sites listed would take an age to scan down to find what you wanted and there are hundreds of ‘definitive lists’ out there.

So what we need is some kind of structure where we can describe or categorise websites or pages in such a way that you can easily find the most relevant ones and then some kind of narrative to tell you the best points or direct you to the actual part or section you need.

This structure also needs to updateable so dead links can be removed, addresses changed or updated and new things added. It would need moderating so it doesn’t get filled with commercial adverts and spam links.

Finally I believe the structure needs to be able to be cross referenced because one site may cover a whole swathe of the curriculum whereas another may be tightly focused.

My personal copy of the curricula I use (the Adult Core Curricula for literacy and numeracy) has a thousand post-its and pencil notes in it and on it. It means I can reference a particular resource to a particular curriculum element or skill. If a site disappears or moves I can update my notes to reflect the change. But you cannot see my curriculum.

What we need is a global copy of the curriculum that we can all stick post-its on. So I built it!

The Skills for Life Living Documentation Project (S4L/LDP) or http://www.peterburgess.net/index.php is a wiki based copy of the literacy and numeracy curricula that anyone can add to, cross reference and edit. If you know of a good resource then you can find the element that it relates to and put the link on that elements entry. If the resource deserves an entry of its own then you can add that and searching the project will show that in its results. I have added Key Skills activities, links to resources, definitions and the entire text of both curricula and then cross referenced them.

The S4L/LDP is my solution to the problem as I saw it, but its strength is that any tutor can add their own content to it and take the project in the direction they want. There is no right or wrong, it is just a shared resource and a structure for sharing skills and knowledge.

Why not add your favourite 5 resources or activities or lesson plans, or anything that is relevant to the project if they are not already listed. The project is not there to suck up your lesson planning time but rather to be dipped into, add a little here and there when you can but with enough people adding just a little each there hopefully will be enough good material to be that place online to get the answers you need quickly and successfully.

Article Source: Main Articles

I have been teaching Adults Basic Skills for more than 10 years and have worked with IT for more than 25 years. I currently run a number of wiki based programs from www.peterburgess.net including the skills for life living documentation project.
I highly recommend visiting here for more info about literacy numeracy

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