Thursday, July 19th, 2012

This is the end...not by a long shot...it is just the beginning.  I am the STIC for my school (School Technology Integration Champion.  I have been going for training on specific software and in turn have been training interested staff at our school.  The training I have received has sorely neglected the AT available for the schools as well as the use of apple handheld devices.  Unfortunately our province and school board continue to go down the netbook road and they have not begun to look at all the advantages of using apps in our classrooms.  Now that I am better informed about what is happening on the AT side of things, I will be the agent of change in my school.  I will try to open the eyes of other teachers in my school and hopefully the eye opening will trickle up through the HRSB.  Barb, you have opened the eyes of 20 teachers, who in turn will go back to their 20 different schools, and begin to share their knew knowledge with 20 more colleagues.  That's 400 teachers in one fell swoop.  The demand for this technology will start as a whisper and escalate to a roar that will not be able to be ignored!

Wednesday, July 18th, 2012 Writing Process Blog

/http://writingassistivetech.blogspot.ca/

The link above is to our new blog on assisting and supporting writers in the classroom.  It was a lot of work, especially the opening overview of what the writing process entails :) (that was the part I worked on).  I think if I had not misunderstood what was being asked, it would not have been so bad, but as a classroom teacher when someone asks me to talk about the writing process, I immediately think I am supposed to talk about pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing and publishing.  Once I got my head wrapped around what I was supposed to do and threw the work I had done the night before out...I was good to go.  This blog will certainly come in handy this year in my classroom.  Writing is something I dread teaching in my class because so many students seem to struggle with it, now I understand why.  So hopefully this assignment will lead to new classroom practice that will benefit both myself and my students.  

Tuesday, July 17th, 2012

And I thought the reading task analysis was involved!  The writing task analysis blew the reading task out of the water!  The whole dimension of the graphomotor skills involved makes the writing task that much more complicated.  Up until we looked at the reading and writing task analysis', I had not considered the enormity of the tasks I was asking my students to do.  Now that I have a better understanding of what is involved in these tasks, I certainly have more empathy for those students who struggle with the writing task.  I look forward to approaching writing tasks with an increased use of technology, in my classroom this September.  I have had the opportunity to use both Write Outloud and CoWriter in my classroom.  While I believe that CoWriter is a great piece of assistive technology, my students have not always been eager to use the program.  I will have to wait and see how it is received by the students in my class this coming September.

Barb's Writing Task Analysis

UDL Tech Tool Kit

Click on the link and it will take you to all of these great resources!

Vocabulary Spelling City - Parts of this website can be used for free, but the premium rate is $49.99 for the year.  Teachers can utilize this site with their own sets of spelling words or premade lists can also be used.  Students can log in under the student page and use the ready made interactive spelling tools.  This would be a great site to incorporate into literacy centers in my classroom.

National Library of Virtual Manipulatives - I love this site and actually have it bookmarked on my class website.  It is a great interactive resource tool for students.  The used can select the grade level and strand they are working on.  The user can then complete interactive activities using manipulatives such as base 10 blocks, an abacus, fractions, tangrams, and the list goes on...Best of all, it's FREE!

A Maths Dictionary For Kids - I can't wait to add this to my class website!  I encourage my students to use the glossary in the back of their textbook but this is even better.  Students just click on the letter of the alphabet that the word they need to know starts with and a  list of terms appears.  Students select the term and a definition and a visual example appear!  Awesome!

Bubbl.us - Brainstorming and organizing tool.  Very similar to inspiration.  Easy to use and free with sharing capabilities.  This would be great for all those students who do not have inspiration or kidspiration downloaded on their home computer.

Online Note Taking Tool - An interactive resource from the ReadWriteThink.org website - Can print notes or copy and paste them into Word. This program would be great for helping students to organize their thoughts before they start to write.  It allows you to set main ideas and put supporting details below the main ideas.  It was very user friendly and comes with a very quick tutorial. 

Monday, July 16th, 2012.

Kurzweil

It was nice to finally put a face to a program I had heard of but knew nothing about.  I would hear the resource teacher in our school talk about getting it installed on the computer in her room for a specific student, but I did not know the program could be of benefit to soooooo many students.  When I think back to the class of students I taught this past year, I am wishing that I had access to this program on the LCD in my classroom.  The text to speech part is great, but Kurzweil is so much more than that.  The ability to highlight text, and insert the bubbles really added more to the program than just being read aloud to.  It is unfortunate that it comes at such an expense that students and teachers have to jump through so many hoops to get access to it, and that is what AT is all about, access to the information.  I can see that I will not be getting a copy of Kurzweil loaded onto any of the netbooks in my classroom, so I will have to settle for second best, managing to get an ipad for my classroom.  Apple products come with so many universal access applications that any of my students could adjust the settings on the ipad to meet their needs.  Now, I just have to figure out how to get one for my classroom.  If I was really smart I would figure out how to get one for every student in my class, but I think that is setting the bar just a little bit too high.  I will set my goal for one, and that is a long shot.  I think I will start with taking my ipad to my school and doing some demos for our staff and then go from there.  My principal is retiring in June, maybe he will want to go out on a high note!

My Apple Journey

OK...so here's the scoop...I have a mac and on the weekend all I heard about was all the problems that people had downloading Kurzweil....and that it took 12 hours etc.  So I thought, well, I will just have to share someone's computer in class on Monday.  So Monday morning rolls around and I am feeling really guilty because I did not try to download it.  So I sign up for the free download and it took like 10 minutes!  I couldn't believe it!  Yeah mac!  Three years ago it was time for my family to purchase a new home computer.  My husband kept insisting on buying a mac.  I was totally against it, because I had always used a pc, and I knew I was the techi in our home, and not much of a techi at that.  So I finally relented, and said, "Buy what you want, but don't expect me to help you use it, or solve any problems you have with it."  So, we ended up with a mac.  The first year was a total learning curve for me and there were many times that I wanted to smash my husband's face through the monitor, but I had no choice but to persevere.

Flash Forward to last summer, after having an imac in our home for 2 years, I started taking courses and realized that I needed a laptop.  I am ready to go buy a pc for three or four hundred dollars...then my husband starts in on me again...you need to buy a mac laptop...you are buying a mac...don't waste your money on a pc...you are throwing your money away if you buy a pc...it will be outdated by next summer...so once again I relented (I knew he was right), but I am a cheap ass.  So now we have an imac, macbook pro, two ipod nanos, a first generation ipad, and an ipad 3.  This learning curve has allowed me to become more fluid and flexible with my technical abilities.  I use macs at home and pc's at school, but now I am thinking I will be taking and using my macbook and ipads in my classroom this fall.

Math Webinar

I love to teach math, it is my favorite subject to teach!  I had two students this year that really struggle with math.  One was eventually diagnosed with a non verbal learning disorder.  I wish I had been using the ipad apps in my classroom this year.  I think those two students could have made significant progress using some of the apps, especially the ones that had spatial applications.   I especially liked the Symmetry Shuffle for teaching slides, flips and turns.  I always find that quite a few of my students struggle with transformational geometry.  I can't wait to use the clock apps and the money apps with my own kids.  We just need to add to the app that you really can't buy much for 5 cents anymore!   I also think that the Pizza Fractions and Lobster Diver could come in very useful in my grade five classroom.  I could see my students being very motivated by these apps.