Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Make Your Own Flashcards


You can make your own flashcards to use in lessons for ESL or Basic Literacy. I found that I could make a nice looking set in just a few minutes using Power Point on my computer at Literacy Network. Granted, you need to know the fundamentals of Power Point if you want to do it quickly, but if you have it, use it. As I often say about finding resources, "It's free if you get it at work."
I made bilingual cards here. For reading, you could create a card with a big letter (lowercase) and a keyword from the back of your phonics cards. You could bring a laptop to lessons and simply cycle through the cards as a slide show. To find the images you could either use Google and do an image search then copy-and-paste the image onto a Power Point slide, or use a clip art disk. The less technically adept may have found this paragraph to be gobbledygook. Any tutor who wants more advice about this may call me for tips by phone.
Myself, I still haven't got all aspects of PowerPoint totally nailed down, even though I use it for trainings and presentations. For instance, I haven't figured out how to make nice handouts that you could use to print your slides if you don't have access to a computer during lessons. However, I did find this exercise pretty easy. I'll be on vacation next week, so please let me know if you learn anything on your own. As always, thanks for teaching someone.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"It's free if you get it at work" may or may not be true. An employer might not agree with using company/organization resources for something outside of work. The "litmus test" I would suggest is: if you're hesitant to ask an employer whether it's OK to use (whatever), then you probably shouldn't.
For you (Brian), using resources at the Literacy Network for ESL doesn't have this issue. But, for a volunteer tutor reading the blog, a generalization to their workplace might place their job at risk.