What can Online Learning do for you?

Online learning is becoming increasingly popular. Several college courses are adapting a hybrid model of learning. Students are in the classroom part of the time, and spend the other part taking the class online. And I’m sure we’ve all seen the commercials about getting your degree in your pajamas. While most of us are hesitant about this new format, since we prefer human interaction, there are several benefits to taking a course online.

1. Convenience. With an online course, you can learn anytime, anywhere, and at your own pace. You can do it in the comfort of your own home, a library, a coffee shop, or your favorite place with wifi. The material is easily accessible and you will do better since you can spend as much time as you want on lessons and activities

2. Student-Centered teaching. Online courses use several different modalities for learning. You can read text and articles, watch videos, listen to audio, and participate in online discussions.

3. Increases student interaction. Participating in discussions is less intimidating since there is anonymity in an online environment. Even if you are in the course as your name, you may never see or meet your classmates. There is also an equal playing field. In a lecture class, there could be a couple students who are dominating discussion. Through online learning, everyone contributes to the discussion (it could be required).

4. Increases technology skills. Let’s face it, some of us have better computer skills than others and we could all improve on what we know. Taking a class online gives you the opportunity to experience and get familiarized with the computer and new technologies.

5. The instructor is easily approachable. In the classroom, you  might be nervous to approach the instructor, there might be a long line, or there could be limited availability for other reasons. In an online class, you are sending messages and participating in discussions with your facilitator.

With the help of the Department of Education, the Florida Literacy Coalition is launching an online tutor training course this November. Community Based Organizations throughout the state will be facilitating a course for their volunteers, but we will also offer a facilitated course for organizations unable to facilitate their own course. If you would like more information on the course and how you can be involved, please contact schmidta@floridaliteracy.org.

Karen Estrada: Health Literacy and the Military pt. 2

Education should be in the form of graphics, plain language, and a manageable list of appropriate resources. Military life and culture by nature are complex; the types of injuries sustained by our service members are particularly complex as they incorporate both psychological and physical issues.

While there are many excellent resources available to our service members and vets, they are not always ‘easy’ to find. The internet, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms are almost always a cacophony of electronic noise. If the individual has a traumatic brain injury or PTSD, or becomes suicidal, it becomes almost impossible to find appropriate resources.

An example I can use to illustrate this is suicide. These are findings taken from several recent Department of Defense (DoD) reports.*

• Family members of married and single Service Members do not generally receive service-sponsored education and training in suicide prevention.
• When training is offered to family members and friends, many obstacles prevent wider attendance.
• A significant number of Service Member suicides occur in the context of friends and family members having recognized out-of-the-ordinary behaviors by their loved ones in the days and weeks before the suicide event.
• Some family members who lost loved ones to suicide reported that they “knew something was not right” but were unaware of the significance of what they were “seeing,” especially post-deployment changes and stress reactions.
• When family members did recognize the significance of distress, they often reported that they did not know whom to call for help.
• Often family members feel as though they are left on their own to endure the personal pain and struggles of their loved one in the Armed Forces, with no one to turn to.
• All too often, these loved ones have no idea how to access vital support systems.
• This is especially true for non-local family members, such as parents and siblings of single Service Members who see their loved ones only when they are on leave.

The importance of the military family’s role is increasingly being recognized in a wide variety of mental health, traumatic brain injury, and suicide prevention programs. Generally, family members do not receive the Services’ education and training programs and are usually unaware of resources available to support Service Members and their families.

As health information literacy educators, we can all make a difference in a service member or veteran’s life. Even if you don’t work directly with this population, chances are you know of someone who has a loved one either serving in the military or who is a veteran.   I will put the reference citations used for this article on my web site: Military Health Matters.

*I would add the DoD and Veterans Affairs (VA) have been making extraordinary strides to remedy these issues and their efforts are beginning to pay off.   

Karen Estrada, M.S. Military Health Matters, LLC. 

Karen Estrada: Health Literacy and the Military pt. 1

As we approach the end of Health Literacy Month, I would like to share some of my observations regarding health literacy and the military.

There is a scarcity of published medical literature concerning the association of ‘health literacy’ and military members. One study by Weld (2009) concluded a favorable health literacy rate among active duty service members as compared to the national population. This is in part due to ‘universal access’ to health care and structural access. In addition, the level of health literacy would be influenced by enlistment standards (both educational and language), but not socioeconomic factors.

Health literacy is an empowering factor that allows the patient to be an engaged and active participant in their health care rather than passive. When a service member goes from a ‘warrior’ to wounded, they lose their sense of control over almost everything and anything. While ‘loss of control’ is challenging to any human being, for a service member it can be quite devastating.

Health literacy / care barriers:

Civilians

• Uninsured or medically underserved
• Low English proficiency
• Low socioeconomic status
• Low educational skills

Military

• Access to quality care (shortages, e.g., mental health specialists).
• Frequent deployment cycles (when state-side, training, schools, etc.)
• Deployments (overseas)
• “Stigma”
• Locality (location near a health facility, whether a base or a VA facility).
• Chronic fear (for both the deployed and family members left behind).

While there are many factors that cannot be changed, in all the time I have worked with service members, vets and their families, I have consistently found one common element that indeed could be very effective in improving health outcomes and begin breaking down the barriers: education.

Roberta Reiss: Five important tips for a great conversation club

Roberta Reiss

1.  Research grammatical structures that are challenging for English learners.  Chose only one or two per session for participants to focus on, practice and perfect.

2.  Always model an activity first, i.e. show by example what you expect the participants to do or achieve.

3.  More true conversation occurs if your activity is designed around “closed tasks.”  For example, ask a participant to reproduce a drawing based on the directions offered by his or her partner.

4.  Design “two-way tasks” for your activities so that an exchange of information is required.  For example, asking one learner to tell a story to another learner requires only that the second learner listens.  The “two-way” version of this activity would be to ask a learner to interview a partner and report the information back to the whole class.  This activity requires listening, questioning, answering and clarification.

5.  Try to include new vocabulary, a few idioms and a few verb phrases in every session.

Roberta Reiss: Top 3 things to keep in mind when facilitating a multi-level conversation class

1.  Start a class by reviewing challenging vocabulary or vocabulary necessary for the task/discussion.  More advanced participants can improve their pronunciation while beginners expand their vocabularies.

2.  The facilitator should circulate through the room when pairs/groups are working on a task.  Offer encouragement, be available to answer questions, and help with pronunciation.

3.  Let learners “negotiate” language.  Create activities during which pairs or small groups of learners try to make themselves understood within the pair/group in order to achieve a product, find an answer or reach a goal. They then report back to the whole group.  The more advanced will be able to help out the beginners.  If by chance a pair/group of beginners is formed, the facilitator should join them for a while and assist.

Erika Heiges- Numeracy: A Key Component of Health Literacy

Erika Heiges

Numbers, numbers, numbers.  Just like words, they’re everywhere in the information we read.  Numbers are used to quantify something, to interpret a message in order to take action.  I often come across numbers and marvel at how unruly, complex, and confusing they can be.  I think about others – the patients I work for and the adult learners I tutor and wonder how numeracy skills affect them.

I think about an adult learner I tutor – Anna.  Anna is 45 years old and has basic literacy skills – she reads at about a fifth to sixth grade reading level.  Anna often brings magazines and books for us to tutor from.  She talks about recipes she’s tried over the weekend.  As we look at recipes to try, I discover she has difficulty with numbers, particularly fractions and measurements.  She often follows a recipe’s ingredients but estimates portion sizes.

Now let’s just interplay my work as a health educator and my tutoring experience.  What if Anna were living with diabetes?  What might be the role of numbers in her life? Anna would need to understand the nutrition content of foods, portion sizes, blood glucose numbers and ranges, and how to accurately take pills or injections.  Numeracy skills would be a critical part of Anna’s daily diabetes management.

Supporting numeracy skills

Let’s say Anna is just learning to check and log her blood sugars.  She has just checked her blood sugar, and needs to log the result and determine what action to take, based on her blood glucose meter reading.  Her blood sugar log simply says:

Write down the results of your before- and after-meal blood sugar in the log below.

• Your before-meal blood sugar should be in the range of 70-130 mg/dL
• Your after-meal blood sugar  should be below 180 mg/dL                               

My blood sugar results mg/dL	Before meals	After meals

Instead, we can provide clearer direction and ways to facilitate understanding and action such as:

Write down the results of your before and after-meal blood sugars in the log below.

• Your before meal blood sugars should be between 70 and 130 mg/dL
• Your after meal blood sugars should be between 70 and 180 mg/dL

			Write your blood sugar results here:
My blood sugar results mg/dL			Before meal	After meal
	High*	Higher than 300
		261 – 300
		211 – 260
		180 – 210
	Goals	131 – 179
		70 – 130
	Low*	51 – 69
		Lower than 50

 ….

….

….

….

….

…

….

…do you know things about health lit?

hello dear reader. You cna’t see me! 

*If your blood sugar numbers are in the high or low ranges, follow your doctor’s instructions on what to do to treat low or high blood sugar.

Supporting numeracy in our efforts

Studies have shown that people with low or even basic literacy levels often have poor understanding and control of their conditions and are less likely to actively participate in their healthcare decision making – whether that be making and attending appointments, clearly understanding what healthcare providers communicate, or accurately taking medication.  And as the trend in chronic health care moves toward more patient self-management and collaborative team care, health literacy – and numeracy –become even more important.  As experts and professionals working with adult learners, we can support learners’ health literacy and numeracy skills by making clear communications for use in the field, in research and practice, and by touting valuable resources for healthcare providers to use with patients.

Some resources and research tools available:

• American Medical Association’s Health Literacy and Patient Safety:  Help Patients Understand educational kit
• EMPower curriculum for adults
• Diabetes Literacy and Numeracy Educational Toolkit (DLNET)
• Diabetes Numeracy Test (DNT)

Erika Heiges is the Director of Health Education at HealthEd. 

Why you should visit St. Petersburg, site for the 2012 FLC Conference

Downtown

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With an average of 361 sunny days a year, there’s no doubting St. Petersburg’s sunny disposition. But it’s the action in downtown St. Pete that has things really heating up in the ‘Sunshine City.’

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St. Pete Pier

Featuring seven miles of beautifully preserved downtown waterfront parks, the area makes for a perfect leisurely stroll along the shoreline. This pedestrian friendly city center boasts more than just an abundance of sunshine, offering up open-air eateries, shops, boutiques and culture galore.

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Dali Museum

The Pier, a landmark building located in the heart of St. Petersburg is a unique piece of Florida architecture that offers visitors a chance to experience the waterfront along Tampa Bay. Located at the end of a 1/4-mile-long approach, this five story inverted pyramid features shops, restaurants, its own aquarium, live music and even boat docks.

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Museum of Fine Art

Downtown is alive with the arts, including the stunning new Dali Museum, the permanent home of the most comprehensive collection of the great Spanish artist’s works. You can also visit the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) or the Chihuly Collection, two other world-class spots for art lovers. The MFA features 4,000 objects, including works by Cezanne, Monet, Gauguin, Renoir and O’Keeffe—while the Chihuly Collection (the only space of its kind in the world) is a permanent display of works by legendary glass artist Dale Chihuly.

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Chihuly Chandeliers

At night, things really get going. Bars and restaurants of all kinds sling drinks and every first Friday of the month, the city hosts a big block party along Central Avenue, complete with live music, food, drinks and dancing in the street.

We hope you enjoy your stay! Register for the FLC Conference Today!

Health Literacy Missouri: Our health literacy ‘elevator speech’

Health literacy is a nebulous concept. It relates to a variety of challenges that exist in the health care system and solutions that are ever evolving.

Since Health Literacy Missouri opened for business in December 2009, we’ve continually refined how we talk about “health literacy” and how to relate it to our various audiences.

As we celebrate Health Literacy Month, we want to share some of the main points we’ve come up with as we’ve developed our trainings over the course of two years. Our hope is that it inspires your own “elevator speech” about health literacy.

• Health literacy is the bridge between the patient and the health care system. It is about giving patients the ability to make good health decisions in their everyday lives.

• Approximately 90 million American adults have basic or below basic literacy levels. This is roughly the combined populations of Belgium, France and the Netherlands.

• Low health literacy costs the United States economy between $106 billion and $238 billion a year. This would be enough money to insure 47 million people – the entire populations of California and Missouri combined.

We know it’s impossible to address all of the barriers that exist within the health care system, but awareness of the issue and what factors impact a patient’s ability to succeed in the health care system is a first step. Beyond that, we encourage these best practices for improving health literacy in your work:

• Follow the Health Literacy Universal Precautions Toolkit , which offers step-by-step guidance and tools for assessing your practice and making changes to better connect with patients on all literacy levels.

• Apply these basic plain language principles when communicating verbally: slow down, move from points that are most important to know to least important, break complex information into chunks and limit your message to 3-5 main points.

• Use teach-back, a method that lets patients describe concepts in their own words and explain or demonstrate how they will do a treatment.

What health literacy messages and practices do you use?

For more information about our organization and health literacy, visit our website.

Betsy Stoutmorril: Count Down to Improve Writing

Writing Challenges

When given a writing assignment, one of the first questions struggling writers often ask is “How long does it have to be?”   Focusing on length instead of content can be an indicator that adult learner are struggling to put words on a page or are not confident that they have anything to say.

Confidence and Proficiency

Recognizing and acknowledging that writing is difficult for many adult learners is the first step toward improving their writing.  Giving adult learners a specific and manageable structure for writing and gradually increasing the writing demand improves their chances of become confident and proficient writers.  Also perhaps, it helps them to fall in love with words and accept the challenge of crafting good writing.

Ask for 200 Words

Think about asking for word count on assignments.  Asking for a page or even a paragraph can be anxiety producing, because a blank page is hard to fill and how long is a paragraph anyway?  Asking for 200 words is much less threatening.  For example, this paragraph has been crafted to have exactly100 words. This may not look like much of a challenge, however to novice writers 200 words can be huge, but it’s concrete! Word count is an amazing tool that also allows us to gradually increase the demand by 25-50 words until the novice writes a full page!

Structure and Simplicity

Explain what word count means and how to use the “word count” function on MS Word under the “Review” tab.  This might encourage them to learn to type or word process, too!  Also let them know that the average person writes about 10 words and types about 15 words on a line—so you’re asking for 200 words or about 10 to15 lines.  Very concrete!

Here are simple structural things to do to help a struggling writer find success on your next writing assignment:

• Create a sample passage
• Offer specific “step-by-step” written, visual and oral directions
• Provide a short list of topics, but also be willing to be flexible
• Set the stage for pre-writing skills with lines for three ideas and five important words
• Describe how proof reading and rewriting improves the final product

A Final Word about Word Count

Also, if you really want to see word count really work to your advantage as a teacher, try limiting the word count!  When I was trying to improve the content of writers who use a lot of words but don’t actually say very much, I would put strict parameters on word count.

When I taught intensive reading for at-risk high school students, I would limit summary sentences to 10 words or introductory paragraphs to 25 words.   This would result in the students working intensely (Just like I did crafting that 100-word paragraph!) to get the exact word count.  Some of my students would even complain that they needed more words!  Sure loved hearing that!

Albert Lang: Celebrating the Spirit of Moving Your Feet!

When you think October, you think candy, costumes and revelry. However, October is also Health Literacy month – an interesting pairing to say the least. The best thing about Halloween is all of the walking and running and laughing – basically fun in and of itself!

We need to make this kind of exercise available to all on a regular basis. If we’re ever going to turn the tide on the obesity epidemic, we need to find ways to make it easier and safer for people to walk, run, bike, and just get moving. Right now, about 23 percent of Americans say they do not participate in any form of physical activity and only about half of us reach the minimum recommended levels of exercise.

Clearly, people need to take responsibility for their own health – but it doesn’t hurt to get a little help from your friends, family, community or even the government!

Recently, Senator Tom Harkin introduced the Safe and Complete Streets Act of 2011 which will help the country get smarter about how we think about transportation projects — so we aren’t just focusing on planes, trains and automobiles, but also on ways to use our feet. The Act would ensure federal transportation projects are efficient and promote better health for all. Where we live, learn, work, and play all have a major impact on our health.

This Act is part of a broader movement within the federal government to focus on “health in all policies” – the notion that everything from education, transportation, housing, etc. has an impact on health. The government has begun to do its part to make it easier for individuals to make the healthy choices for themselves and their families.

The collaboration of different government agencies fits under the National Prevention Strategy (NPS) umbrella. The NPS, coupled with the Prevention and Public Health Fund – an historic investment in improving the country’s health and quality of life, reducing health care costs for families and businesses, and increasing productivity so the country can compete with the rest of the world – commits the federal government to doing its part to ensure all Americans have the opportunity to be as healthy as can be.

TFAH is committed to ensuring this strategy is fully implemented and that we build support for the movement around the country so we can fulfill the promise of a healthier America. Finally, the federal government its building awareness of how people can live a healthier and happier life.

Albert Lang is the Communications Director at Trust for America’s Health. You can follow them on Twitter @HealthyAmerica1