Week 5 Reflection

Essential question: Which technologies are best to assist differently abled learners in my classroom?

Please check out my group’s presentation on prezi at  https://prezi.com/u7wzsjtuju8q/new-your-big-idea2/# . A beautiful presentation was put together with my team that included the other classmates, Rachelle, Josie, and Jim. Last week a few of us in the group felt like there was a disconnect in communication. This helped us shape what this week’s goals and priorities are and of the priorities is having some meaningful participation in the group by forming roles.

Three of us met after our Twitter session for about 30 minutes last Monday. The reason of meeting was to re-create and formalize roles for the second half of the presentation. Josie was not able to meet because of the time zone. I took notes to communicate to her what we talked about. These are the notes and labeled roles of the teachers.

Establishing Roles:

Mariah- Leader; research 3 pieces of technology: live scribe pens, readability, myHomework

Jim- Researcher; 3 pieces of technology: translation app, assisted hearing

Josie- Tech Person 2 pieces of technology: ???

Rachelle- Editor 2 pieces of technology: staying awake while reading (watch, color overlay)

Timeline:

Friday- Write up the 6 pieces of information for each of the Assistive Technologies and send this to Rachelle (or the whole group).

Saturday- Rachelle will create a slide for an AT and enter all 10 AT’s information into 10 similar slides with help from Josie if needed. Josie will animate the slides into Prezi.

Note: It is my understanding that we will be adding on to what we already prepared last week.

Josie responded with that she would like to look into BeeReader and Dragon. We decided everyone would do some research and a bit more for Jim and I because we would not be working on the tech side of the presentation. The goal was for each one of us to research AT that would help students with disabilities in our own classroom. A few of the group changed exactly what they researched in attempt to stay true to Assistive Technology being for students with disabilities.

I focused my research in looking for Assistive Technology that could be provided for a student of mine that is Autistic. He is a senior so I decided to look into what colleges are willing to provide and then search out farther from that. My goal was to have a list of suggestions for him and his parents on what they can ask for when he gets to college especially because he must advocate for himself more frequently.

I have decided to asking my coworker, Special Ed director, to look into getting my student a Live Scribe pen so that he can learn and get used to the process before he leaves a supportive learning environment. I forget how important technology can be to our students with disabilities because it can get them to the content that they are learning.