Another UPP-date
(This picture is a Let's Read plaque that KFL&A Public Health is providing for medical waiting rooms.)







UPP Online

Susan Ramsay and Deb Wood are busy designing the online content for the UPP Online portion of the project.
UPP Online Plan

• 5 hours total course deliver time per week for UPP curriculum online.
• 2 one hour sessions per week using Centra - Deb Wood is designing the content and will instruct this portion.
• 3 hours per week of Moodle learning activities that connect to the content Deb Wood is designing - Susan Ramsay is designing the Moodle learning activities.
  

Susan and Deb have both sent me drafts of the first theme and it is excellent.
The Centra portion will be through Contact North and I'm pretty sure the Moodle portion will be through AlphaPlus.

I'm looking for a developer who will take the work Susan is doing and create the actual Moodle activities. I hope to have that sorted soon. We plan to begin piloting in January.

KL&S / CEFL Website
UPP Curriculum Online
The UPP Curriculum for practitioners on the CEFL website will be redesigned to provide more continuity between the Essential Skills piece and the curriculum thus making it easier to navigate. This work will start in December.

UPP Programs

ALSO and KL&S UPP Programs

Both ALSO Ottawa and KL&S UPP programs are up and running! The pre-assessment PDQs and questionaires have been done at both sites.

UPP Rural Program

Learning Centre for Georgina in Keswick, has signed an MoU and will our site for the UPP Program in an rural setting. It is very exciting to have this part of the project underway. The program in Keswick will focus on young parents who will be working towards upgrading their skills so they can then complete high school and beyond. The project taking place in partnership with a group called "Rose of Sharon" which is providing key childcare support.

UPP Urban Program
We have yet to contract with an urban program to provide UPP. There is one program reviewing the idea of having a program at their site right now. I hope to know soon.

UPP Research
As mentioned above, the PDQs and questionnaires have been done at ALSO and KL&S UPP Programs. LBS students at KL&S have completed the PDQs and questionnaires too. The pre assessment will also take place at the Learning Centre for Georgina.

The control group that is not involved in any parenting program or upgrading program has been very hard to recruit. I had four names on my list but as it turned out these folks were all high school graduates and so are not eligible! It is a very big request (at least 2.5 hours of rather frustrating testing, PDQ) for a very limited number of potential participants.

Some ideas:

• Provide a very large incentive ($100.00) - not sure we can afford that!


• Ask those in the existing UPP group to encourage friends to do it and provide a finder's fee


• Ask any folks who drop out, to come back and do the post test

Do you have any other ideas?

FYI - FREE PDQ Tests

HRSDC has bought 10,000 PDQ tests and will make them available to literacy programs to use for their programs for FREE. PDQs cost between $9.00 and $15.00 each, depending on how many you use. If you want to know more, email me and I'll send you the contact information at HRSDC.

Deb

UPP - Date

Deb Wood congratulates Suping, an UPP student, at KL&S Celebration of Learning in June.

Althought tt was disappointing that no programs came forward to do the UPP curriculum, it has given us the opportunity to try a more direct approach to programs. I contacted a couple of early literacy/family literacy practitioners who work directly with LBS programs in their areas. Both had ideas as to which programs might be interested and contacted them with the additional information about the project I'd sent them. I'd hoped to hear back from the programs, one rural and one urban, about doing the UPP curriculum with parents in their program starting in October. I haven't heard back yet and I'm crossing my fingers that it might be due to holidays and so on. If I don't hear back soon, I'll beat the bushes again! ALSO in Ottawa and KL&S in Kingston are both on board and will start programming in the fall, after a recruitment drive for participants.

I'm meeting with Noriyeh (our research consultant) mid-September to talk about the research pilot - how it went, what seemed to work and what didn't and so on. We'll re-jig as necessary and put the plan in place as programs start up with the curriculum. Both Isobel and Deb Wood, instructors for the UPP curriculum last year, suggested that the students do the PDQ after a couple of weeks of computer orientation so that they feel comfortable with the technology.

Late June I met with UPP facilitators, Isobel Bisby (ALSO) and Deb Wood (KL&S). Both agreed that the curriculum package had lots of "meat" to it and said they hadn't had time to complete all the learning ideas and explore the learning resources with their students. To boost the prose and document reading aspect of the curriulum, it was suggested that the UPP instructors for the project be directed to add reading activities that emerge from the curriculum and best suit the particular student or group needs. I will also create a blog or wiki (haven't decided which) so that instructors can share their experiences and their ideas with each other on a weekly basis.

I hope your summer was good. Get ready - September is here!

Deb

I'm back!

I loved the Pysanka at Vegreville Alberta!

Hi folks,

We got back from our 10,303 kms drive out west and super holiday last Wednesday. We had a wonderful time seeing this fantastic country, taking part in the Centre for Family Literacy's "Cultivating Connections" conference in Edmonton and visiting with friends and family. Now I look forward to the fall plans for the Building Family Literacy and Essential Skills OLES project.

I mentioned in my last blog that by the second week in June I'd posted the call for proposals to provide UPP in an LBS program on our website, that I'd sent it out to Ontario literacy networks to forward to their region's LBS programs and had posted it in the CLO e-bulletin which goes to all community based literacy programs.

The proposals were due July 16. I did not receive one proposal nor did I have any inquiries. At the conference Lorri mentioned that she had forwarded the call to a program in her region that she thought might be interested but I didn't hear from them. What do you think we should do? Our intention was to start the UPP programs in October.

I'm thinking that there may be a few issues:

• The children's program or childcare is not a program that LBS programs normally sustain. For most LBS programs this probably seems like a difficult aspect of this project to take on, especially if they have not made partnerships with childcare programs in the community before this.


• Most Ontario LBS programs focus on essential skills for the workplace and do not see family literacy programming as a fit for their participants.


• Ontario Works recipients do not need to attend school or to look for work until their children have entered the school system and so, are not likely to join an upgrading program so participant recruitment might be seen as a possible difficulty.
  

I met with Isobel and Deb Wood, facilitators of the UPP program at ALSO and KL&S respectively, to talk about the UPP program, how it worked for them and ideas for the future.

I received the final PDQs and questionniares from ALSO and KL&S too. I'll connect with Noriyeh soon to talk with her about the results and the best ways to move forward. Noriyeh was away for June and July.

We (Dave and I) took hundreds of photos! I might add a few to the blog now and again.

For more info about the Pysanka:

http://www.vegreville.com/sub.asp?MainID=55&SubID=106

Hope all is well!

Deb

UPP - Date

This is Shelley, coordinator of the UPP children's program and Jas, our UPP children's program facilitator with two wonderful UPP children!

The Call for Proposals for the UPP Pilot Sites has been posted on the KL&S website http://www.kingstonliteracy.com/ and the CEFL (Centre for Expertise in Family Literacy) http://www.familyliteracyexpertise.org/ website. I sent a notice to LBS programs through the CLO's May E-Bulletin and I sent the posting to Literacy Networks who work within a 500 kilometre radius of KL&S. The due date is noon July 16 2010. If you know about a program that might be interested, please let them know about this opportunity.

By the last week in June all UPP students and the very small LBS control group will have completed the "pilot" pre and post PDQ tests and the questionnaires. I am very interested to see the overall results and to think about how it all worked. I'm curious to find out if the PDQ is a good pre and post test, if the the questionniares give good information and if we are missing any other important elements.

A comment from an UPP instructor has got me thinking that it might be good to include a way to evaluate the "soft skills" that UPP participants are learning in their groups. All instructors have commented positively on the growth in self-esteem and confidence that their students have shown during the UPP program. And, these too are essential skills.
Deb

The 3 D's

The past few weeks we've been figuring out the process for the Design, Development and Delivery of the UPP on-line training modules. The 3 D's were new to us. It took a little while to get our heads around them. Design and development sound like the same thing but actually they are completely different. Design involves module content, activities and evaluation ideas. Development is the technical side where the activities are formatted into working items that students can complete on-line. Development includes creating the on-line Moodle activities and surveys, flash animations and so on. The first few times, Delivery to students is usually done by the Designer, just to make sure everything works the way they designed it to work.

Thanks to a KL&S board member, who coordinates ACE on-line at St. Lawrence College, we now have a good understanding of what needs to be done. I'll spend some time deciding on a framework that will be applied to each module. We will hire contract curriculum designers, who will most probably teachers who have already used the UPP curriuculm in a class. And we will get advise on who to hire to do the development part. The delivery will start in October.

A Little Hiccup

The "UPP Curriculum Pilot" call for proposals for Ontario LBS programs who are interesting in piloting the UPP curriculum, will be posted soon.

We had a little hiccup getting the call for proposals ready. Anne, Carynne and I will review "the call" tomorrow and then have it proofed. I'll send it to the Advisory Committee for review early next week. I expect the call to be posted on the KL&S and the Centre for Expertise in Family Literacy websites mid next week. The due date for proposals will be June 25.

The Project Steams Ahead!

Call for Proposals

Kathy, Anne and I met on Monday to discuss the content for call for proposals. Kathy will write up a draft call and send it to me early next week and I’ll send it to the advisory committee for comment. It will be posted on May 17, so if you know a program that might be interested please let them know.

To give programs a “heads up” about the project, we are sending a short notice about the call to CLO so it can be posted in their next monthly e-bulletin. The project does not have the funding to travel to far reaching places or for program staff to come to Kingston. Hence we need to limit the geographic range for programs within a 500 kilometre radius of Kingston. We’ll also send the notice to networks within that range.

There is funding to provide instructor support (about 3 hours per week) for three rural programs. This will be our way to provide service to more rural locations.

Online Course Designer

On Friday, April 23 we are interviewing three candidates for the Online Course Designer position. We had a number of applicants, but not many who have the background we are looking for. Let’s hope one of the candidates we interview is “the one”!

Facilitator’s Manual

I’m working on the Facilitator’s Manual. Lesley Hamilton is reviewing the themes with an essential skills lens. This is very helpful for me because I don’t have much experience with essential skills and I want to make sure it’s correct and worthwhile for instructors.

Reminder about Quarterly Reports

I’ll be sending the quarterly report forms out to those who have “in-kind” arrangements with KL+S for this project towards the end of next week. They’ll need to be returned by May 15.

Deb