Blog Post 8

When we visited the A.T. lab before the break, I discovered that the amount assistive technology that could be used for education is much broader than I initially thought. One piece of tech that I think can be utilized in the classroom is the zoom-in tool. I think this tool can be useful for the students with poor eyesight because it can enlarge their desktop and help them better navigate their desktop. Another tool I saw as very useful was the type and speak tool. I feel this tool can be very useful because I feel it gives a equal learning opportunity to both visual and auditory learners. The last tool I feel will could be useful is the smart pen and book. I think the smart pen and book is most useful because of it's many uses. It can record the teacher lecture which can help students who want remember specific detail about the lecture, It has a camera that can help with students who forget lose track in class. The most useful part of the tool, in my eyes, is the fact the all the info saved to it can be stored to the cloud which can be really effective for students when it comes to assignment storage and note taking.

PowerPoint as a tool can be very beneficial and can strongly support student learning at each level of Bloom;s Taxonomy. Through PowerPoint, students can create by customizing the own slides with different patterns, fonts, and images. Like if a student was doing a PowerPoint about birds, they could insert images of birds to indicate a theme. From there they can evaluate by using tools to help understand there argument. Students can evaluate by using bulletin points on a slide to figure what supports their idea. Next, students can analyze by using tools that help them list and compare stats. For example, they can uses the tables feature to categorize their info that help support their argument. Students can also apply by using tools in PowerPoint to help find out if there argument is valid. An example of this is if a student had an idea for a solution to a math question. If they wanted to check, there is a equation tool that list the equation, so they can apply their thinking to the equation. Student can then understand by reviewing their material, and looking at both sides of their argument through their slides. PowerPoint gives students a easy, fast, and entertaining way to discuss these ideas by providing them with tools like tables, charts, and shapes, all in an effort to make sure they can make their material understandable. Students will find PowerPoint to be most helpful when they need to remember. PowerPoint is most useful for this because of the many methods that can be used for remembering, such as making a game of jeopardy out of notes.

In effort to keep up with technological advances, I feel the most helpful website for this would be the tech page on mashable.com. Mashable is a website that focus mostly on technology while also focus world news that can correlate with tech. I feel this site is great for keeping up with technological advances because it's always on top for the latest updates in tech and provides all the most important info. The tech page is helpful because with the news on the latest update in tech, it will help not only in educational tech but tech in general. This means that through this website, a teacher will be able to understand and interact with students through the tech they use most and a teacher will be able to utilize this in educational ways. http://mashable.com/tech/?utm_cid=mash-prod-nav-ch

Blog Post 7

Adaptive Technologies are pieces of technology made in effort to help learners with disabilities that could not use certain pieces of computing equipment when it came to class room activities and assignments done on computers. This was all made possible by the American's with Disabilities Act, which was passed in 1990, which made it illegal to discriminate against anyone with any disabilities and made it so any disabilities would be accommodated for. These adaptive technologies support learners by accommodating to the learners disability, making it easier for them to learner. For example, if a learns disability hinders their eye sight, the learner is provided with output technology that help them gain the information through magnified screens, text-to-talk devices, or braille printers. Same can be done for in disabilities that hinder mouse control or typing, they can use input technologies such as track balls or joy sticks instead of mouses or voice recognition technology. The only time I've ever really seen any use of this technology in or out of the classroom is my father using it when texting because of his poor eyesight. The Biggest challenge I see coming from this tech is I fear that any students might have an disadvantage. I fear that a student using input tech like voice recognition might not get the all the right material as a teacher could mumble or trip over there words. The same goes for a student using output technology like text-to-talk.

Making a website for this class was one of the most interesting things I've ever done for a class. It was very easy and very difficult when it came to making, posting and editing my website. The most helpful skill I received from the entire assignment was probably creating a link on my website. That's gonna be most help for me in the future when it comes to updating my teacher website and adding links for certain assignment. This skill will let me make it easier for students to find helpful links without having to memorize or copy and paste them. What I liked most about this assignment has to be coming up with grade level and subject part of it. I'm an aspiring history teacher, so being able to set up a rough image of my actual future website was really enjoyable. What I dislike the most was searching for links to put on my pages. While I find teaching history to be fun, I also found out that it was extremely difficult finding useful link that could pertain to such a broad subject like World History. What I would improve on next time is adding more color and interaction to my website. I feel like my website is more simple but stuff on the website is easy to find. Next time I want to make my website stand out. This activity will be very helpful in the future because it will give me more experience and a better idea when it comes to the construction of my future class website. http://riicharddiick.weebly.com/

The new skills I learned from Diigo have became a major game changer in means of sharing. The fact that it's another education sharing application is helpful enough, but the fact that you can bookmark a page and highlight key pieces of info for a SPECIFIC GROUP is what makes it a real clutch tech tool. This tool will be most help full in computer lab days and take-home online reading assignments in a high school history class. Before Diigo, teachers would give link for student which would lead to giant article reading and the students would have to figure out and read the parts that contributed to the class. With Diigo, not only can the teacher highlight the most important parts but now the students can also highlight parts and other articles that they feel will also be useful. Diigo will also be useful when using it with team member, as it can be used to share articles, tech tools, and websites that could contribute to future lessons. Diigo personal use will really help me because with the use of the tool I can keep track of what websites, tools, and online games I intend to use when planing out my lessons each week.