Settlement Language Training PD

It would be helpful to put phonetic description besides the word as in a dictionary. Sometimes it can be hard to hear clearly how the word sounds. Most of my Chinese students have electronic dictionaries which has IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) besides the words. With the phonetic description, my students can pronounce the word better.

Use pictures as labels instead of words.

I hope to be able to customize the SCORMs to be able to use in a lower multi-level class. 

A wide variety of learning activities can be done from one single news story. As a listening activity, this can be linked to the external stories itself or the teacher can clip it using Audacity. Students are able to listen to the story as many times as they want. Questions can be general, comprehension or more detailed. 

Follow this with a reading of the news story (through an external link). Questions from this can mirror that of the listening. A writing activity can follow (as a forum or blog or wiki on Moodle) to surmise the student's response to the new story. This would work for a variety of levels depending on the new story itself. 

A hands on activity for beginners to practise correct spelling by identifying vowels, beginning sounds and ending sounds.

Create custom word lists for each topic area (ie. weather words, housing words, etc.) on the VocabularySpellingCity website and create links to the lists in each topic area so that learners can practice the words over and over again, play games with the words and take practice spelling tests.

For students who are new to computer concepts, the Forum can be used to facilitate typing activities. With a template prompt created by the teacher, students can copy and modify a simple document to share a personal anecdote about themselves Eg. The teacher's favourite kind of weather is changed and personalized to become the student's favourite kind of weather.

I see potential in using a Wiki to develop a group writing activity reviewing a trip.  Students would be encouraged to add a vocabulary item or simple sentence about the trip.  Reviewing the growing list could encourage reading and vocabulary retention.

Blogging can be a good way for lower students to practice keyboarding, spelling, and sentence structure.  I would like to have students blog about weekend activities, then have their classmates read the blogs and respond to them.  This would create more interaction between students as well.