EDSE 241 Week 5

Assistive Technology Centers

What can you do to be a resource or a support for students, teachers, school, district in low tech or no tech to provide accessible mainstream technology support?

I really like the idea of creating a tool kit for general education teachers using things like high lighter tape and post it tabs, etc. I can also create a kit to keep in my room since my room is grand central station at my high school. Each of the resource specialists at my school has a subject matter designation. For example, I am math, my neighbor is English, one other teacher is history and one, science. I could create a kit for each of the resource teachers that is subject specific for working with their content area and we could each keep it in our rooms. That might encourage the general education teachers to come to our rooms to discuss strategies and accommodations and create more integration.

How can you use powerpoint as a learning and teaching tool?

I would like to create a powerpoint as a lesson and upload it to our school loop. Then, I will have the students sit at their computers and go through the power point with me in their own accounts, but they will be able to click on the links to go to extra practice sites, etc. I'm also on a freshman success team and I could create power points for use with professional development. I'm also on a math team for our district that is looking at the best structure for math inclusion and we'll be creating a model for the rest of the district to look at so I can use a power point to create presentation with video and audio to illustrate the model.

EDSE 241 Week 3

Speech to text/text to speech is built into

Reflection: How can you use the different features you're going to learn about in word for students and/or for yourself?

for parents, teachers, students, professional developme

I use Word and Excel a lot in my practice. However, I have not had experience creating forms. I think this will be helpful when doing an assessment at the beginning of a unit. I also think it will be helpful in creating getting to know you forms. The Excel will be incredibly useful for keeping IEP schedules and notes. It will also help me keep track of goals. Behavior charts will be good to keep on excel, as well.

As for professional development, I think there are a lot of functions on Word and Excel that I can use, including the math equation, that will help me in assessment practices as well as for practice.

EDSE 241 Week 2

The future of our kids depends on our ability to teach our kids about technology and how it is used in today's world.  

What are you doing to do as a special educator?  What can you do knowing that your students' futures are going to be linked with technological needs to help get them ready?  

As much as possible, I try to mix my teaching with the use of technology.  So every day my students work for an hour with with me in person and with each other interacting and half an hour interacting with a computer program called Apangea.  Apangea is a program that helps students work out word problems using a 5 step approach.  It has avatars to guide students through the problem and give advice.  The program will also connect students to live tutors to help them solve any problem they are working on.  Students start to become quite savvy navigating through the program.  It also ensures they will be using a computer program for a short amount of time each day.  I would like to start mixing it up and allowing students to go to other websites to do math work.  I think if I create a class website, I can have links to other websites.  Students can go to my website and then pick a math website to work on for the day, so they can have some variety.  IF they have a central place to go to get the websites, it will be easier for them.  I can have them work on excel to complete equations and use the program to create spreadsheets with functions.  I can have them create power points to explain how to solve problems to other students, which I can then upload on my website (that will be created by the end of this class.)  In the past, I have had engineers from Intel come to my class and talk about computers and what they do in their jobs and prerequisites for the jobs they have.  Right now, the majority of my students have issues logging into the computer, typing, and interacting with websites.  If I can just get them more comfortable with that for starters, I will have accomplished something.

AT: Can they function without it? If they can't function without it, it is assistive tech.  

Highlighter tape - this is cool!  I have some students for whom this would make a difference in how they are able to interact with their textbooks.  

No tech/Low tech document - I will print this out and share it with my VP.  I'd like her to share it with some of our teachers who are working in our inclusion pods.  

Differentiated instruction vs. Universally designed classroom: UDL is bigger umbrella which includes in it differentiated instruction

math websites - there are some great math websites on Larry Ferlazzo's website.  It's a very cool resource.  Thanks.

Answer the question: What is UDL?  And apply it to your topic/classroom and what you do.