ABE: Adult Basic Education

Pixlr is a powerful photo editor that is online and completely free. Edited images can be posted to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, or simply saved to your computer or online with its own Web address (URL). If students are adding images to an essay or flyer, they can have fun editing and enhancing the image with Pixlr.

There are three levels of Pixlr.

• Pixlr Editor is a powerful image editing tool similar to Photoshop
• Pixlr Express provides many borders, overlays, and effects that require no experience to use
• Pixlr-o-matic offers easy borders and effects.

This lesson will focus on Pixlr-o-matic, but once your students master it, you will likely find them experimenting with Pixlr Express and Pixlr Editor.

ABE: Adult Basic Education

Low, Intermediate, High

This acitivity titled "Songs My Teacher Taught Me" is a series of three lesson plans intended to guide students through approximately one month of poetry study. This unit involves minimal technology requirements, but extends across a wide range of poetry. Of the eighteen poets included; eight are women, six are African-American; two are nineteenth-century poets and the three lesson plans are thematically broken into "What is Poetry?", "Poems of Childhood," and "Self and Society." Each of the three lesson plans includes a short reading list, a brief introduction setting tone and theme, a series of analytical questions, two creative activities, and at least one writing assignment.

Also at the site you will find all you will need to teach poetry including curriculum, essays on poetry, biographies of more than 200 poets, text of nearly 600 poems, and RealAudio of 80 poems read by their authors. Poets.org also allows visitors to create their own anthologies of content from the site.

ABE: Adult Basic Education

Intermediate, High

Remind: Safe Classroom Communications (from Remind101) is a safe, easy to use communication tool helping you connect instantly with your students. It is great as a reminder of assignments, tests, or holidays. Students receive the message as a text, e-mail or smartphone notification. You can send messages, photos, files or voice clips directly to their phones. You can see who has viewed the content via the app. The app provides a way to track your communication with the students and allows for both one-way messages and two-way conversations.

ABE: Adult Basic Education

Low, Intermediate, High, All Levels

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.

ABE: Adult Basic Education

Low, Intermediate, High, All Levels

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.

ABE: Adult Basic Education

Low, Intermediate, High, All Levels