View this email in your browser
You are receiving this email because of your relationship with World Education. Please reconfirm your interest in receiving emails from us. If you do not wish to receive any more emails, you can unsubscribe here.

IN THIS ISSUE

New on the Blog: Making Good Use of Free Apps
XPRIZE Update: The Final Push!
In Case You Missed It: IDEAL Consortium Handbook Series
What We're Reading: Social Media for Literacy Development

Welcome to another edition of ETCetera, where we bring the latest from The EdTech Center to your inbox.

NEW ON TECH TIPS

Making Good Use of Free Apps in Support of New Mobile Learning Initiative

Linda Beliveau is a technology teacher specialist at Nashua Adult Education in New Hampshire. Adult Basic Education programs in New Hampshire are part of Team WorldEd’s Adult Literacy XPRIZE Communities Competition effort. In her program, Linda has taken the lead establishing processes and support resources to help other teachers make use of the free mobile apps made available to learners as part of Team WorldEd. This blog post features resources that have been especially helpful getting learners going and supporting student persistence.

Read the post

XPRIZE Update

The Final Push for the XPRIZE Communities Competition

This coming month we are going all out to end the competition as strongly as we started! We are grateful to the incredible team of program partners that have come together to make this success happen, and we strongly encourage you to keep learning the apps with your learners!

We at the EdTech Center want to support you in your exploration of the mobile learning apps, and encourage you to make use of all of the resources on our team page linked here.

In case you missed it, our most recent Team WorldEd support webinar had an overview of all the materials assembled so far, and feedback from a practitioner using them. Find that webinar here.

Every download and conversion (I.E. making sure each learner uses the app on at least three separate days!) counts, as the competition is neck and neck, so let's keep up the momentum and get these apps to the people who need them.

Visit Team Page Here

In Case You Missed it

IDEAL Handbook Blog Series

The IDEAL Consortium has recently published a series of Tech Tips blog posts highlighting effective strategies for starting up and enhancing distance and blended learning programs. Don't miss this unique opportunity to engage with insight generally available only to IDEAL Consortium members!

Click the images above to access the posts.

What We're Reading

Social Media for Literacy Development

A report from the University of Hamburg, “LEO – Living with low Literacy”, provides detailed demographic information on the approximately 6.2 million adults in Germany with low literacy skills and includes survey results on their digital literacy habits. One interesting finding is that adults with low literacy skills were found to use social media (Facebook or Instagram) at slightly higher rates than the average population. The report posits that social media presents authentic and regular reasons to read and write to adults with lower literacy.

This finding is of interest to the EdTech Center because it supports prior research conducted by Jen Vanek, our Director of Digital Learning & Research. In Social Presence and Identity: Facebook in an English Language Classroom, Dr. Vanek and her coauthors (Dr. Martha Bigelow and Dr. Kendall King, both from the University of Minnesota) found that their newly arrived refugee and immigrant young adult ESL students got a boost to their writing fluency and landed on highly interesting research topics when teachers used social media in pre-writing activities.