The perils of last year's worksheets...

You know, you'd think I would have learned by now that a worksheet, even a recent one, can be fraught with perils if you're silly enough to think "Hey, that's fine, it doesn't need anything changing"- and this when I was altering other worksheets!

It is most definitely a con of using them in terms of resources- they become out of date. This is especially true of Internet worksheets. You would think that a webquest involving jobs on the internet would be reliable enough. OH no. Of COURSE, the sheet asks the students to write down how many jobs there are in Nursing this week on the Reed website, in the students' local area. Fine, yes? No. NATURALLY, there are NO jobs in nursing listed this week. Which of course causes merry hell. ESOL students are daunted enough by IT, without problems like this cropping up. We have enough trouble with Microsoft Word, which keeps coming up with at least 3 pop-up windows asking the students about macros. MACROS! Most of them are just about able to save and print, and to log in given 5 or 10 minutes, or at the higher end of Entry 2, to insert clip-art from the internet. Extra windows mean they flounder, helpless in a sea of supposedly useful bits of information. I do wish the college would think about these things before installing all kinds of exciting new programmes on the computers. MOST of the students who use them will have no trouble. But MOST is not ALL, and it causes no end of wasting of class time.

I feel that a more formal version of this particular rant- which is a bugbear of mine- will form part of my report on resources for the training course. I cannot see the wisdom in keeping ESOL students grouped according to their language ability for their IT classes. I just can't. IT is a separate basic skill. We can't assume that just because a student speaks excellent English, they will be similarly excellent on the computer. They would get far more out of their IT classes if they were grouped through an IT diagnostic for them. As it is, in most classes there are some students studying one thing, and some studying another- and the amount of time this uses up in terms of planning is a waste. Teachers DO have better things to do than plan five separate lessons for the same 2 hour period. Yes, differentiation is possible to an extent, but surely it would be better to be differentiating the level of English (which causes just as many problems for ESOL IT students) used in the worksheets than what the students are studying. ICT, for all its wonders, is a whole new world for most students, so in my ESOL classes (as opposed to ESOL IT), as far as I'm concerned, the best way to incorporate IT is for me to use it, not the students.

With that in mind, I'm getting trained to use Qwizdom on Monday- meaning lots of push-button handset fun for my classes- I use the PC, they don't have to. I can't wait! I've been dying to learn how to use it since the end of the Summer term, which is when I first saw it demonstrated.