Hi! Thanks for checking out my blog! I am a wife to a fantastic fellow and mother to 3 sweet boys. I teach grade 3 at Greenfield Elementary School. This course is providing me with so much information that I can incorporate into my class!
It seems like I blinked and the past 3 months have flown by! When I first started this course I felt I had working knowledge of computers and some other technologies but was eager to learn about assistive technology specifically. During the past few school years this term has come up and I always felt like no one was ever able to really go beyond pencil grips and computer time when AT was mentioned as a possible accommodation for some of my students. When I saw this course was being offered, I signed up immediately!
At times I found this course very overwhelming. It seemed I was not as knowledgeable as I had thought! Not everything worked the way I wanted it too, and things that may take others no time at all left me sitting here at my computer for quite a while. Taking all this time to not always get the outcome I desired may have added to my frustration levels, but it also gave me something else - empathy. How many of my students go through this every day? How many know they should be able to do something, but just can't seem to get it to work? The different steps that our brains need to go through to read and write are two examples I took from class. If I can incorporate AT into a lesson that makes a missing connection happen for a child, then I've succeeded! To see how a blog can aid in lessons the whole class can enjoy as well as help those with special needs feel included and not so out of the ordinary after all was great! Learning about how aps can give confidence back to students who before had been so self aware of using something different from their classmates and now they fit in like everyone else makes such a difference. There is just so much out there beyond pencil grips! Here is a video I found of a presentation that goes through many of the AT available to students in today's classrooms. Check it out!
This course gave me so much information and resources that I now feel so much more prepared to help my students reach their potentials. Just being made aware of what is out there, to go beyond the simple steps my school has been taking and know to reach further was worth taking this class for! The group work allowed for more communication and shared learning about various topics and getting to see the results of everyone's hard work was fantastic! A great resource for sure! Thank you so much to everyone for sharing your knowledge and hard work during this course, it made every Wednesday fly by! Good luck with the rest of your classes or congratulations on finishing up! Yay for us!
Wednesday 6 June 2012
With each class that passed we've been exposed to so many different apps and technologies that can help our students. In a recent rally at our school we watched a video of one of my former students, Marcus. I have his brother this year and both boys have autism. I was so excited to see that he has used an app to create his own video game. The reaction of the students was so great, they were so excited to see what he had done, and his brother was so proud too! The conversation that resulted from seeing what someone in their own school could do was fantastic! Not only were the students amazed that someone made a video game, but to see students go up to Marcus afterward to talk to him about what he had did and if he could teach them how to do something like that did worlds for Marcus' self-esteem and socialization with other students. It really is what I was looking for from this class! What an opportunity for Marcus and myself! The app Marcus used was 3D RAD. He made a video racing game "in his spare time", which took about a week. I'm really disappointed that I can't get the clip to load, I'm on a PC and it was taken from a MAC and won't read on my computer. I can sometimes get the audio to play, but not the video, and it won't post at all. Boo for that, Yay for Marcus!
Well, due to technical difficulties involving a severed fiber optic cable for my provider I was unable to be in class on the 16th. I have had the chance to watch the recorded version of class and so I thought I'd give a short reflection on what I observed.
Even though I am a teacher, my eyes were opened today as I learned about the reading process. It amazed me the number of steps our brain has to go through just to read a simple paragraph. How our brain is able to put together all the information in the correct order to make sense of even a simple word is truly mind boggling! I now have a greater understanding and appreciation for something I always took for granted. I can also now understand more clearly what happens to students in my class who because of one or more misfires or disconnections have such difficulty with reading what's put in front of them. Connecting this to the next class when we watched Misunderstood Minds, it's good to know that there are interventions and technology that can help these students overcome the disconnects.
We were also introduced to Inspiration. We have this and kidspiration at the school where I teach, and I have dabbled in it before. Even though I knew the general idea of the program, I've never really used it with my students. Now, I can see what a valuable tool this is and am excited to use it in my classroom. Pairing this program with the information about on how the reading process works, I put together a diagram. Although not as intricate as I'd like, I hope you can see from the diagram that this is a very complex process!! Check it out below!
Look how far I've come baby! Tonight's class gave us the opportunity to work as a group on one of two assignments. Our group chose to do the grade 2 assignment of coming up with a blog to help our class learn about the life cycle of a frog. It was great working with a group of people who were organized and on task - not to say previous groups were not, I've actually been really lucky this class! I was amazed at how quickly our blog came together and at how much practical knowledge I've retained in how to organize a blog as well as search for things to put on the blog that would be of benefit to those in my class who need assistive technology. (Didn't hurt to add to my level of knowledge about frogs either!) Looking at what we were able to produce in such a short amount of time really impressed me and makes me even more likely to venture out and try something like this on my own. Before this course, I was unsure of most of the technology out there and really not sure of how I could ever integrate it into my everyday use. Now, with assignments like this one, it seems so much more doable. Check out this link to see what our group has come up with! http://tadpoleteachers.blogspot.ca/
