High School and GED

High School and GED, Adult Basic Education

The CASAS STEPS Reading test has been approved as the primary tool to measure progress and ensure accountability for adult English as a Second Language (ESL) students in California. This shift has left many teachers wondering about the most effective strategies to prepare their students for this important test.

Career Technical Education, High School and GED, Older Adults, Adult Basic Education

The Adult Learner Variability Navigator (ALVN) is a one of the only tools for adult educators that links learner factors, and strategies to research. The project was funded through Digital Promise, a global nonprofit working to expand opportunity for every learner.

Career Technical Education, ESL and Citizenship, High School and GED, Older Adults, Adult Basic Education

The HyFlex (Hybrid-Flexible) model of instruction has gained significant traction in adult education, especially in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. This instructional approach allows students to choose between attending classes in person, participating online in real-time, (simultaneous instruction) or engaging with course materials asynchronously. (Only some agencies do the asynchronous option) As adult education continues to evolve, the HyFlex model offers a promising alternative to traditional and fully online instructional methods, but its effectiveness and implementation challenges must be carefully considered.

Career Technical Education, High School and GED, Older Adults, Adult Basic Education

Adult educators who are early adopters have embraced the power of generative AI tools to create customized lesson materials, differentiate instruction, and save time. Using Large Language Models such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and others effectively requires an understanding of how to prompt the tools, but sometimes the output just does not give us what we are hoping for. Other times, the generative AI tool may “hallucinate” – give inaccurate information. In these cases, iterative prompting (conversing with the AI to give or request more clarity or by providing examples) can help, but by that point, how much time has truly been saved?

Career Technical Education, High School and GED, Older Adults, Adult Basic Education

What is Accessibility? According to Wikipedia, Accessibility is “the design of products, devices, services, vehicles, or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities.” . I like a more personable definition ( it mirrors the graphic above), “Educational materials and technologies are “accessible” to people with disabilities if they are able to “acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services” as people who do not have disabilities”

Career Technical Education, ESL and Citizenship, High School and GED, Older Adults, Adult Basic Education

Whether you teach Economics or ESL, Citizenship or Math, including video content in lessons has numerous potential benefits, including alignment with adult education standards. Videos that support lesson content can build students’ background knowledge, a key shift of the College and Career Readiness Standards. One principle of the adult education standards for English language learners, the English Language Proficiency Standards, is integration of multimedia technology into curriculum, instruction, and assessment. The standards’ 21st Century definition of literacy includes visual and digital literacies. Video is a means to boost these literacies, building students’ college and career readiness.

Career Technical Education, ESL and Citizenship, High School and GED, Older Adults, Adult Basic Education

As large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Gemini are being utilized more and more in education, we, as adult educators, need to become prompt engineering aficionados, finessing prompts to get the results we want. But really, who has time for that? Here is where the rays of light come from the heavens and illuminates MagicSchool.AI. MagicSchool was created to alleviate teacher burn-out by creating easy to use AI (Artificial Intelligence) tools for lesson planning, differentiation, assessments, and more.

Career Technical Education, ESL and Citizenship, High School and GED, Adult Basic Education

In the last ten years, Distance Education has evolved into various modes of instructional delivery that have increased our students' Digital Literacy skills and provided thousands upon thousands of adult students the opportunity to attend classes in flexible modalities that have addressed their changing needs. Educators and students benefit from the flexibility of the various learning modalities that are now available for adult education programs to adopt. Preparation is key to the success of these innovative and engaging learning environments. In this article, you will learn about the characteristics that differentiate the Hybrid, HyFlex, and Online Live learning modalities and some tips to assist you in preparing for, planning, and implementing these innovative modes of instruction.

Career Technical Education, ESL and Citizenship, High School and GED, Holidays, Older Adults, Adult Basic Education

Introduction: In the January article, "Streamline Planning with AI: Craft Custom Lessons," Susan Coulter detailed how teachers can harness the power of AI through platforms like Chat GPT and Google Bard to streamline their lesson planning. However, the transformative potential of AI in education extends beyond the classroom. In this article, we will explore how adult education students can ethically and responsibly leverage AI to enhance their language and content development.

Career Technical Education, ESL and Citizenship, High School and GED, Holidays, Older Adults, Adult Basic Education

Every district has their own format for writing lesson plans, and I remember it being a manual and time-intensive process. Typically, this involves crafting lesson objectives, carefully choosing, arranging, and presenting different activities to address a particular learning goal.

High School and GED

HyFlex combines the terms hybrid and flexibility. While in hybrid learning, the instructor makes all the decisions about the format, in HyFlex learning is based on students deciding how they would like to be taught. Some choices of a HyFlex environment can include the following as well as a mix of them:

Career Technical Education, ESL and Citizenship, High School and GED, Older Adults, Adult Basic Education

Collaboration. Collaboration Tools. Collaboration Activities. All good terms for working in groups to move learning forward and enhance the learning experience.

Adult Basic Education, Career Technical Education, High School and GED

EdReady is a personalized math and English readiness learning system that evaluates the skills of each student in the context of their goal and then provides a learning pathway to mastery.

Adult Basic Education, ESL and Citizenship, High School and GED

21Things4Students is an online resource to help students improve their technology proficiency as they prepare for success in the real world." You will love this resource, not only for your students and your class, but also for yourself. This website has everything you want or need to teach your students about digital literacy and citizenship. It not only teaches students, but it also has a section dedicated to teachers who may feel they lack some of the skills themselves (more on that later). An added plus: there are no student logins, so students won't need accounts or passwords to use the site.

Adult Basic Education, ESL and Citizenship, High School and GED

An electronic portfolio is an online showcase of a student’s work, which can include writing, images, artwork, links, and multimedia.

High School and GED

HippoCampusExternal Link Icon opens in new window or tab is a searchable database of more than 7000 free videos and multimedia resources in the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC) library.

Adult Basic Education, Older Adults, ESL and Citizenship, High School and GED, Holidays

Here are some Web sites to check into for more on Veterans Day events and information. Appropriate for High School/GED, ESL and Older adults.

Adult Basic Education, ESL and Citizenship, High School and GED

There are many Web sites that allow you to create both interactive and printable word puzzles which can help with language development. Give some of these a try. You may find one you cannot live without.

Adult Basic Education, ESL and Citizenship, High School and GED

Use these sites in your studies of Presidents.

High School and GED

NoRedInk is a fun tool to help students improve their writing skills. Students learn grammar, mechanics, usage, and style by using a curriculum based on their favorite celebrities, friends, TV shows, and more.