Technology-enhanced language learning (TELL) has long become an integral part of education in Canada. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the need for Online Learning offerings has been tremendous. LINC programs had to pivot from in-person to remote instruction, and many accomplished this rapid response with the support of the Avenue – LearnIT2teach project.

The Avenue team is pleased to announce the availability of new content for LINC programs using Avenue.ca. We recognize the value to teachers and learners of having up-to-date materials that are PBLA compatible. As a result, the development of new PBLA-compatible units and modules for Avenue is ongoing by the Centre for Canadian Language Benchmarks, the Toronto Catholic District School Board and New Language Solutions.. Twenty-eight new units and modules across all LINC levels are now available. They focus primarily on various aspects of financial literacy, workplace communication, Canada, and literacy support.

This new content is pre-installed all new courseware. For teachers who already have their courseware, these modules can be previewed in Avenue’s PBLA Sample Modules course.  If you’d like any of these modules added to your course, please let your mentor know. 

The following units were developed by the Toronto Catholic District School Board.

• Numbers (CLB 1L-2)
• Canadian Money (CLB 1L-2)
• A Calendar (CLB 1L-2)
• Saving Money When Shopping (CLB 1)
• Personal Banking (CLB 1-2)
• Insurance (CLB 1-2)
• Back-to-School Shopping (CLB 1-2)
• Work and Pay (CLB 1-2)
• Canada: Provinces and Territories (CLB 2-4)
• Canada: Population (CLB 3-4)
• Canada: Indigenous Peoples (CLB 3-5)
• Canada: People and Diversity (CLB 3-5)
• Work and Pay (CLB 3-4)
• Internet and Phone Scams (CLB 3-4)
• Online Banking (CLB 3-4)
• Choosing a Bank Account (CLB 3-4)
• Taxes in Canada (CLB 3-5)
• Online Shopping (CLB 3-5) 
• Making Requests at Work (CLB 5+)
• Instructions and Procedures at Work (CLB 5+)
• Workplace Laws and Policies (CLB 5+)
• Participating in Meetings (CLB 5+)
• Resolving Conflicts at Work (CLB 5+)
• Workplace Culture (CLB 5+)
• Participating in Online Meetings (CLB 5+)

This unit was developed by a team at the Centre for Canadian Language Benchmarks.

• Finding a Place to Live (CLB L1-CLB L2)

These modules were developed by the New Language Solutions team.

• Participating in Workplace Meetings (CLB 7-8)
• Job Interviews (CLB 7-8)

The Avenue – LearnIT2teach Project team was challenged by the pandemic to help teachers adapt blended learning courseware for remote online delivery. An important part of our response was the development and delivery of Zoom webinars for teachers. Since September 2020, more than 30 webinars have been delivered live, then saved to our webinar archive. That archive is now available on the project portal at learnit2teach.ca/wpnew/help/avenue-webinars/

As the pandemic diminishes, and the LINC Sector is able to once again complement face-to-face teaching with learning technology in a blended or hybrid mode, new and recorded webinars will continue to be available to support LINC teachers and programs.

Greetings to all the hard-working dedicated folks in the Canadian settlement language training sector. It’s been one very interesting and challenging 12 months for educators and especially learners. This is the third in the series of project bulletins we launched last April. We want to keep you informed about how our project is working to respond to the sector’s needs, especially during the pandemic.

Needless to say, we were just as surprised as anyone by the onset of COVID-19, and it caught us in the midst of getting www.avenue.ca ready for launch as IRCC’s new learning portal for the LINC Sector. Pre-COVID, we understood and supported blended learning, and supporting online remote learning was already part of the medium-term plan, but suddenly it became necessary to adapt blended learning courseware to online delivery and coach teachers along to enable it.

So here we are in March 2021 and there’s hope Canada can beat this menace down by the end of the year but there are still some months to go before we can really relax. Avenue was launched in August and EduLINC went offline to students on December 23rd. Account requests are one metric we can use to judge Avenue’s success. On November 1st we had fulfilled 8,000 account requests. By March 2021 that number had risen to 17,520.

Teachers continue to express 90+ satisfaction with the teacher training stages, and our in-service supports like Live Help, the teacher only forums, and email continue to be fully engaged. We’ve seen a 400%+ increase in demand for the free PD since March but our capacity to take on new LINC mentees remains strong. Like all LT pros in our sector, our coast-to-coast network of 19 teacher mentors has risen to the current challenges.
Meanwhile our development and IT team has not stood still. Here are some enhancements made to Avenue since the August launch:

ePortfolio

The ePortfolio solution was launched in November but we’re still adding, tweaking and building it out. Since launch we’ve improved it so teachers can:

• view their learners’ ePortfolios;
• upload files to their learners’ ePortfolios;
• view all of their learners’ artifacts, including those from courses they do not teach;
• access the ESL Literacy, Stage II, and Stage I Language Companions;
• use the About Me tag and tool bar filter;
• delete artifacts;
• auto collect the teacher feedback;
• edit the artifact information (e.g. skill, file name) after it is collected;
• in addition to PDF and image files, teachers and learners will be able to upload a few new file types to the ePortfolio, including MP3 and MS-Word, PowerPoint and Excel files.

And there’s no fixed timetable yet, but in the near future enhancements will include:

• adding new activity types that can be tagged for auto collection, e.g. Workshop;
• adding new file types that can be uploaded

Beyond the ePortfolio development, here are some other Avenue developments:

• H5P – A new H5P activity was released in the version of Moodle used by Avenue. Improvements include the ability to track user attempts, reset function, a Content Bank for sharing, to name a few.
• Workshop – The Workshop activity enables the collection, review and peer assessment of students’ work. Submissions are assessed using a multi-criteria assessment form defined by the teacher. Students are given the opportunity to assess one or more of their peers’ submissions. Students can obtain two gradebook scores, one for their submission and one for their assessment of their peers’ submissions.
• Scheduler – The Scheduler activity helps teachers schedule appointments with their students. Teachers specify time slots for meetings, and then students choose one of them.
• Group scheduling is also supported.
• Account Manager: This portal tool for teachers is used to create Avenue student accounts and to enroll students into their courses.
• Read Aloud – The ReadAloud activity is designed to assist teachers in evaluating their students reading fluency. Students record a passage, set by the teacher, after which the teacher can mark words as incorrect and get the student WCPM (Words Correct Per Minute) scores.
• Wordcards: Enables a teacher to create custom Wordcards games for encouraging students learning new words.
• Snowman: The Hangman vocabulary game has been replaced with a game of Snowman. Users must guess and spell the target word before the snowman melts.
• Tutela integration through single-sign in: The Avenue-Tutela single sign-in gives teachers in the Avenue community access to the Tutela repository without the need to sign in a second time. Eventually, users will be able to add Tutela resources to a “shopping cart” that can be accessed from Avenue.
• Teacher’s Desk – The Desk is an area on the Avenue for teachers to upload, store and even create or edit word processing documents and slideshow presentations. Teachers can seamlessly access the contents of their Desk from their course in the Avenue LMS.

The collection of PBLA-aligned curriculum e-modules continues to grow. This project itself is developing workplace and digital literacy modules but the Centre for Canadian Language Benchmarks and other settlement language training organizations across Canada are actively developing modules too.

What to expect from Avenue in the 2021-22 Fiscal Year:

• Continued LINC course hosting, teacher training and in-service support for teachers; engaged in blended (hybrid) or online distance instruction;
• A custom mobile application to improve the small device experience;
• Unified log-in to both Tutela and Avenue;
• Training options and in-service support for CLIC professionals;
• Continued growth in the inventory of PBLA-aligned e-resources.

Survey: The Settlement Language Training Sector Response to COVID-19

In addition to our usual evaluation priorities, we are keen to gather information on how the sector has responded to COVID-19. Please take ten minutes or so to take this survey and help us understand the local impacts of COVID on teaching and learning for you, your learners and your organization. Whether or not you have decided to implement Avenue as your distance learning response to the pandemic, we want to hear from you.

For more information about Avenue professional development for LINC teachers and coordinators, and the learner courseware options, please contact [email protected] Please forward this bulletin to those who may not currently be on our service provider database. Project service inquiries, comments about this bulletin or other questions very welcome.

Nous voulons attirer l’attention des organismes qui offrent CLIC : le système de gestion de l’apprentissage MOODLE, pour LINC ainsi que pour CLIC, est identique.

Que la formation linguistique soit en ligne ou hybride, les enseignantes et enseignants qui enseignent les cours CLIC disposent désormais d’un support virtuel moderne qui intègre les quatre compétences.

De nombreuses ressources d’apprentissage en ligne ont été élaborées pour LINC au cours des treize dernières années et sont facilement accessibles dans Avenue.

Cependant, des ressources ne sont pas encore disponibles pour l’apprentissage du français.

Toutefois, grâce au projet « TELL ON » et au ministère des Services à l’enfance et des Services sociaux et communautaires de l’Ontario, un certain nombre de ressources en ligne pour le français langue seconde déposées sur Tutela seront bientôt disponibles directement à partir de Avenue.

Le projet « Avenue – LearnIT2teach » est prêt à appuyer l’innovation technologique pour les cours CLIC. Nous sommes à votre disposition pour répondre à vos demandes de renseignements afin de faire progresser CLIC et de créer des occasions d’apprentissage en ligne et hybride pour les apprenantes et apprenants.

Pour de plus amples renseignements, nous vous invitons à communiquer avec Gilles Aubry à [email protected].

The lack of learner access to the Internet and information technology has long been a concern to professionals in the settlement language training sector. The opportunity for newcomers to engage with information technology is essential to successful adaptation to life in Canada in 2020. Now the suspension of face-to-face classes and the need to support learners with online distance solutions has amplified the importance to our clients of access to smart devices and the Internet. We’ve put together this infographic to clarify the difference between equitable access and non-access.

Digital Divide PDF

Adult Settlement Blended & Online Language Training:

What are the pros and cons of blended or online learning? Are there practical ways to introduce technology to the classroom? What impact can Web 2.0 have on program flexibility and learner outcomes? TESL professionals looking for research on blended and online language instruction in settlement programs have a convenient online resource for professional development and research; The LearnIT2teach Project continues to support the development and hosting of “The Annotated Bibliography: Adult Settlement Blended & Online Language Learning.” This Tutela online resource summarizes the contents of more than 100 articles from the research literature. The bibliography is divided into 16 sections ranging from Instructor Readiness to Learner Readiness and Learner Attitudes Toward Technology, all the way to Technology Tools.

Researchers Trudy Kennell and Maria Moriarty researched and wrote the bibliography and update it with new entries monthly. According to Trudy and Maria, “We were glad to have this opportunity. It gave us a chance to apply our separate backgrounds and depth of knowledge in the areas of language learning and blended learning. We were able to critically analyze some very useful research.”

Interesting surprises for the authors were the importance of digital technologies and the Internet in the lives of newcomers to Canada, and the role information technology plays in helping people stay connected to their home country while adapting and adjusting to life in Canada. Making their job a bit easier was, “The availability of such a wealth of material freely available – and just a couple of clicks away – educators, researchers, and scholars are so generous in sharing their thinking and their work.”

Language Learning Leadership Guide

The project is pleased to offer managers and lead teachers in the IRCC-funded language training sector a new version of our leadership guide.  Where previous versions (2012 and 2014) were print and PDF based, the Moodle 3 edition is an online resource on the project portal.

The new guide has some familiar topics but they’ve all been updated and refreshed:

• Technology-enhanced language learning (TELL);
• The function of a learning management system and why we use Moodle;
• The Edulinc.ca learner courseware;
• The professional development stages offered free of charge to the LINC sector;
• The LearnIT2teach’s online resources such as Live Help that support practitioners.

The new leadership guide also examines some fresh and very relevant topics:

• Mobile-assisted language learning (MALL);
• Theory and evidence to show that local leadership and communication are at the heart of the learning technology innovation process;

How information technology can connect with newcomers with knowledge, skills and community to support their successful adaptation to Canada.