ABE: Adult Basic Education

Use this site with intermediate and advanced students for reading practice and building reading fluency with audio support. There are currently 43+ audio stories at the site.

The Northstar Digital Literacy Assessment is a self-guided, online set of assessments that show an individual’s ability to perform basic computer skills in eight skill area areas:

• Basic Computer Use
• Internet
• Windows OS/Mac OS
• E-mail
• Word Processing (using Microsoft Word)
• Social Media
• Excel
• PowerPoint

Use these assessments for post-testing your students on these various skills.

If you listen to NPR radio, you may hear both famous and unknowns discussing their core values and beliefs on weekly broadcasts of the radio spot “This I Believe,” a take-off on Edward R. Murrow’s original 1950s radio show. The site is an archive of all the modern broadcasts accompanied by the original print essays and contains a searchable database of thousands of other essays on numerous topics ranging from patriotism, to family, to sports. Each short essay that has been broadcast on NPR has a “listen now” link to hear the authors read their essays, which provides a listening component for the ABE student. The audio can be the basis for exercises on note-taking, listening for main ideas, supporting details, and cloze (listening for missing words).

This site offers free tutorials and games to learn touch typing. They also offer typing tests for practice.

Every piece of writing is written for a specific audience. Use a blog (an online site that publishes articles in time sequence, newest on top) to publish your students' writing to the world.