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.