February 2002 Issue
Internet Resource of the Month
By
Susan Marcus PalauDirector, Learning Center, Purchase College/SUNY
Email: Susan.Palau@Purchase.edu
Westchester Community College Web Site
In Westchester, NY, we have a Roundtable of neighboring learning center directors that meet once each semester. We get together for lunch and have an informal chat of problems we are facing in developing and running our centers. In the course of last week’s meeting, one of the members mentioned that her college has a great website. So I paid a visit today and I have to agree. Westchester Community College in Valhalla, New York has put together an academic support site that is a mother lode of information for learning center students.
It begins with a “Documentation” section that has links to Columbia and Purdue for teaching the right way to format a research paper. The “Getting Started in Writing” portion is quite interesting in that it provides a great deal of information on writer’s block – not that any of us really need it. This website also has links to other “Online Writing Resources” that provide a wealth of information to student writers once they have gotten over their initial resistance to writing.
The “Additional on Line Resources” part was quite unusual. It emphasized links for ESL and had some fascinating choices. One in particular – “Chat with Alice” is a robot that will converse with ESL students. In addition, there is a link to “Voice of America” for international students, an ESL teachers corner, and ESL links for lesson plans and dictionaries. Speaking of dictionaries, there are two sites that provide complete dictionaries and another site that has reference links where you can get atlases, telephone numbers, stock market information (enter at your own risk) and even listserv and shipping and mailing specifics. This site ends with Westchester Community College’s own study skills guides. To access this rich website, go to www.sunywcc.edu, click on “Credit Services and Programs”, then click on “Academic Support Center”, followed by “On-line Tutoring” twice. You will be glad you did. [Note: You can also use this address to visit the site directly http://www.sunywcc.edu/LEARNING/asc/onLINE.html ]
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