But I wanted to acknowledge your feedback. So I'll just put a response here...
I totally agree that technology and digital readers and writers can aid the older special eduation population. I also wanted to share a little excerpt of a blog I follow (it's the mom of a student I evaluated a year ago) that shows how technology can assist even 3.5 year olds. The things that the therapists that I work with do with this little guy are amazing! He's a rather involved little fella and they use simple (and not so simple) applications to help him to communicate. This Thursday entry has a great example of the speech therapist's innovation. Here's the specific section that I'm talking about. The blog isn't all about his therapy, so in case you don't want to weed through it all...
"First was Miss Maggie for speech therapy. She came with her supervisor who, luckily, is well versed on the communication app I have on my iPad. "Proloquo 2 Go". We set it up so Gavin only saw one choice - a book. He had to touch the screen to hear "Book" in order to get his favorite books! He caught on pretty quick today and did a great job! The iPad can be tricky - you really have to touch "just right" and make sure you're not touching it with your other hand at the same time or it won't work. It's also a little tough as Gavin intentionally touches the iPad - but not in the right spot that gets it to "talk". We're getting there..."
Monday, May 30, 2011
Friday, May 27, 2011
Blog Entry #4
Your thoughts on the reading/Will Richardson's speech:
Richardson's speech was informative, creative, and well organized. He spoke much of innovation and gave some insight into applications of the future that will become the norm. I do think that many of his points were valid and considered more thought. However, some of his point s did seem rather extreme, and possibly detrimental. For example, could there be repercussions from consistently reading from a digital screen? How would an optometrist react react to Richardson's hypothesis about reading and writing taking place only in a digital world in the future? Wouldn't replacing textbooks due to wear and tear be significantly less expensive than replacing a digital readers? Sure students would be given training on how to use their new tools, but kids are kids at the end of the day; even when they're kids that can program an entire video game in an evening and have classmates playing them the next day. On the other hand, would downloading updated textbooks be less expensive than purchasing and shipping hundreds of textbooks every 5-10 years? Perhaps digital readers would provide more up to date scientific, historical, etc… writings.
When experts, such as Richardson discuss the eminent change in how writing is taught, I get a little uneasy in my skin, as I work with 3-5 year olds that are developing their fine muscles in order to be able to print in an age appropriate manner. Merely learning to write with a keyboard would do a disservice to future students and their muscle development. Perhaps cursive writing could become obsolete, but students should certainly be able to print using pen/pencil and paper. We've already taken away tying shoes with the implementation of Velcro and now we could take away the dexterity necessary to print as well. Future students aren't going to be able to button their clothing if we keep taking away their fine motor work.
Basically, I agree that novel technological resources can, will, and should change learning; but I don't think that means we have to throw everything else out the window. The innovators that came up with these resources learned to read and write with books and paper, played outside after school, and were given a chance to create during arts classes. I just don't want education to become so technological that it can never go back to more routine, and valid instruction techniques.
I certainly know from experience, that once you have the new convenience of some novel technology, you can't imagine going back. For example, I have a DVR cable package in my home. It's amazing. I can never go back to regular cable at this point. I've become overly accustomed to watching prime time Thursday evening shows on Sunday afternoons and watching Saturday Night Live on a Wednesday afternoon.
Finally, and I know it's been mentioned before, but I still feel that teachers are using technology in their classrooms out of obligation. It's a delicate to walk during lesson planning between using technology to enhance learning, and using technology to check off a box in the state standards or in your employee review. It's a line that I have been dancing on since I began this degree 5 years ago, and I'm not always sure I navigated the course with precision.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Response Blog 3: Web Based Learning
1. How will you apply the concepts from the above online learning experiences in your final web-based learning experience project for this course?
I'm leaning towards completing an online research module for my final project. The Eric Karl example that I posted on the wiki was really helpful. It got me thinking about how to age appropriately integrate Internet learning into preschool special education lessons. I'll probably make a lesson geared toward itinerant teaching, since I know from previous experience how to organized one of those lessons. Perhaps I'll include a link the blank WELES lesson planner in the teacher section as well? It's always nice to have another planning resource.
2. What content area are you thinking about using? You might have a unit that needs some "sprucing up".
The content areas in preschool special education are pretty basic. Since I'm going to need to use web resources that already exist to help my lesson along, I'll probably just pick a general knowledge concept as opposed to a behavioral or social concept. I'm thinking about completing a lesson on opposites. However, I need to get out there and find some more existing information before I really commit to an idea. Also, I'd like to get a chance to work with a few more Internet teaching strategies before beginning to tackle my final project. But, if I do go with my opposite idea, one example of a useful game that I found was this opposite game. Teaching opposites/beginning concepts can get a little stale for students, so having something computer based might be just what an itinerant teacher would need to maintain student attention.
3. What websites have you found so far that you would like to use?
(You can start your own list in your Diigo account for this project. You can also tag all of the sites for this project with a special tag. Then, when you go to look up the sites, all you have to do is type that tag to search for them!)
Here are some examples of Opposite Lesson Plans that I will modify to meet itinerant preschool special education online learning lessons. I'll use games from some of the other sites I've shared in other posts and blog responses too. Those are all already tagged in Diigo for you. My icon is a dog in a raincoat on Diigo.
http://www.ehow.com/way_5263284_toddler-lesson-plans-opposites.html
http://its.guilford.k12.nc.us/act/grade1/act1.asp?ID=965
http://www.suite101.com/content/preschool-lesson-plan-on-opposites-a322475
http://www.atozteacherstuff.com/pages/363.shtml
http://www.tlsbooks.com/preschoolconcepts.htm
http://www.perpetualpreschool.com/preschool_themes/opposites/opposites_songs.htm
I'm leaning towards completing an online research module for my final project. The Eric Karl example that I posted on the wiki was really helpful. It got me thinking about how to age appropriately integrate Internet learning into preschool special education lessons. I'll probably make a lesson geared toward itinerant teaching, since I know from previous experience how to organized one of those lessons. Perhaps I'll include a link the blank WELES lesson planner in the teacher section as well? It's always nice to have another planning resource.
2. What content area are you thinking about using? You might have a unit that needs some "sprucing up".
The content areas in preschool special education are pretty basic. Since I'm going to need to use web resources that already exist to help my lesson along, I'll probably just pick a general knowledge concept as opposed to a behavioral or social concept. I'm thinking about completing a lesson on opposites. However, I need to get out there and find some more existing information before I really commit to an idea. Also, I'd like to get a chance to work with a few more Internet teaching strategies before beginning to tackle my final project. But, if I do go with my opposite idea, one example of a useful game that I found was this opposite game. Teaching opposites/beginning concepts can get a little stale for students, so having something computer based might be just what an itinerant teacher would need to maintain student attention.
3. What websites have you found so far that you would like to use?
(You can start your own list in your Diigo account for this project. You can also tag all of the sites for this project with a special tag. Then, when you go to look up the sites, all you have to do is type that tag to search for them!)
Here are some examples of Opposite Lesson Plans that I will modify to meet itinerant preschool special education online learning lessons. I'll use games from some of the other sites I've shared in other posts and blog responses too. Those are all already tagged in Diigo for you. My icon is a dog in a raincoat on Diigo.
http://www.ehow.com/way_5263284_toddler-lesson-plans-opposites.html
http://its.guilford.k12.nc.us/act/grade1/act1.asp?ID=965
http://www.suite101.com/content/preschool-lesson-plan-on-opposites-a322475
http://www.atozteacherstuff.com/pages/363.shtml
http://www.tlsbooks.com/preschoolconcepts.htm
http://www.perpetualpreschool.com/preschool_themes/opposites/opposites_songs.htm
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Response Blog 2: Web site Evaluation Lesson
For this assignment, I'm going to have to be a little create to put a preschool special education twist on website evaluation. Typically, with the preschool special education population, we work on functional skills like hand washing, color recognition, and taking turns with peers in play. So, for the most part, we are not asking our 3-5 year old students to evaluate the merits of resources. Nevertheless, there are always some surprise students that end up on our itinerant teachers' caseloads, in speech therapy, or even in some of our developmental delay or autistic support classrooms that can read and therefore require some truly individualized instruction.
Specifically, I had a student, we'll call him Andy, on my itinerant caseload, 4 years ago, who was 5 years old and reading at approximately a 4th grade level. He was a highly functioning autistic child whose family did not want him in a classroom setting. Therefore, I provided educational therapy for him, at home, on a bi-weekly basis, for 30 minutes per session. Andy loved dinosaurs. He read books about dinosaurs, drew pictures of dinosaurs, completed 150-piece dinosaur puzzles, and even had a dinosaur themed daily schedule and reward chart that I made for him at the CCIU Teachers' Center . Andy and I did play some games on my laptop now and then, but I never gave him the chance to explore dinosaur websites during our weekly sessions.
One of his IEP goals was to attend to non-preferred adult directed activities for 12-15 minutes. Even though the topic of dinosaurs is one that Andy preferred, being asked to answer questions about the websites that discussed dinosaurs would not be a preferred activity for Andy. So, I would still have been able to track his adequate weekly and yearly progress while completing this assignment.
In order to get him engaged and thinking about usefulness and safety on the Internet, I would have worked with him to complete the "E=Examine The Content Worksheet" on page 45 on our text book. Andy could have chosen 5 or so dinosaurs to research more on depth. He could have answered the questions posed and deciphered between useful/educational and outdated/inadequate sites. We could have also talked about how just searching for, say, allosaurus would have yielded a lot of facts about that dinosaur; but searching for specifics like what allisaurus ate and the time period in which he lived would have require some additional search words.
In order to have gone a little deeper in our searches, Andy could have used this Elementary School Critical Web Page Evaluation Tool http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schrockguide/evalelem.html from Kathy Schrock's web page to evaluate pages that he found particularly useful. Once Andy had found sites that had the most authentic and accurate information, he could have made a little book about his favorite dinosaurs. It could be something similar to this book on this Enchanted Learning website, which is a site I used a lot as an itinerant teacher. However, Andy could have cut out (another non-preferred activity for him) pictures of dinosaurs that he printed off of his top web sites and chosen which characteristics he wanted to include on each page. And finally, the worksheets on The Learning Page would have been great supplements to give to his parents to follow through with the lesson.
You do have to join both Enchanted Learning and The Learning Page to get full access to their resources, but the resources contained within them were invaluable to me when I was teaching without a set curriculum in the itinerant special education world. Also, joining was a minimal fee each year. His parents were very passionate about following through with what we worked on each week, and I'm sure they would have happily joined one or both of the sites to give him a chance to work online a little more while at home.
Specifically, I had a student, we'll call him Andy, on my itinerant caseload, 4 years ago, who was 5 years old and reading at approximately a 4th grade level. He was a highly functioning autistic child whose family did not want him in a classroom setting. Therefore, I provided educational therapy for him, at home, on a bi-weekly basis, for 30 minutes per session. Andy loved dinosaurs. He read books about dinosaurs, drew pictures of dinosaurs, completed 150-piece dinosaur puzzles, and even had a dinosaur themed daily schedule and reward chart that I made for him at the CCIU Teachers' Center . Andy and I did play some games on my laptop now and then, but I never gave him the chance to explore dinosaur websites during our weekly sessions.
One of his IEP goals was to attend to non-preferred adult directed activities for 12-15 minutes. Even though the topic of dinosaurs is one that Andy preferred, being asked to answer questions about the websites that discussed dinosaurs would not be a preferred activity for Andy. So, I would still have been able to track his adequate weekly and yearly progress while completing this assignment.
In order to get him engaged and thinking about usefulness and safety on the Internet, I would have worked with him to complete the "E=Examine The Content Worksheet" on page 45 on our text book. Andy could have chosen 5 or so dinosaurs to research more on depth. He could have answered the questions posed and deciphered between useful/educational and outdated/inadequate sites. We could have also talked about how just searching for, say, allosaurus would have yielded a lot of facts about that dinosaur; but searching for specifics like what allisaurus ate and the time period in which he lived would have require some additional search words.
In order to have gone a little deeper in our searches, Andy could have used this Elementary School Critical Web Page Evaluation Tool http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schrockguide/evalelem.html from Kathy Schrock's web page to evaluate pages that he found particularly useful. Once Andy had found sites that had the most authentic and accurate information, he could have made a little book about his favorite dinosaurs. It could be something similar to this book on this Enchanted Learning website, which is a site I used a lot as an itinerant teacher. However, Andy could have cut out (another non-preferred activity for him) pictures of dinosaurs that he printed off of his top web sites and chosen which characteristics he wanted to include on each page. And finally, the worksheets on The Learning Page would have been great supplements to give to his parents to follow through with the lesson.
You do have to join both Enchanted Learning and The Learning Page to get full access to their resources, but the resources contained within them were invaluable to me when I was teaching without a set curriculum in the itinerant special education world. Also, joining was a minimal fee each year. His parents were very passionate about following through with what we worked on each week, and I'm sure they would have happily joined one or both of the sites to give him a chance to work online a little more while at home.
Friday, May 6, 2011
~ Response Blog 1~~~ My Opinions and Reflections~~~
The issue I faced with relating to Chapter 2, The Empowered Researcher, is that the students I teach/taught would not be searching on the Internet at any point during my instruction time. Most of my former students were lucky to be able to label the letters in their first name by age 5, so truncating a URL is a little extreme for them. However, this is an issue I've faced often in grad school and at company trainings as research in my general field is minimal. Maybe not research in preschool alone, or special education alone, but in "preschool special education" the amount of research and presentations are skimpy. So I've gotten used to adapting the information for my use and have passed along tons of great ideas to coworkers and friends that work with older students.
The kid friendly search engines mentioned in the text are certainly something to keep in my back pocket for use by my relatives and coworkers. I did decide, however, that it might be helpful if some of the kids search engines/websites "spoke" to searchers more. If my students were to roll over an icon, it would be great if that icon gave them ideas of what they could play with or learn from on a given page with an actual voice output. I can't imagine the time and effort it would take a web designer to set something like that up, but I bet a pro would say the idea isn't totally off the wall or unachievable. I guess a lot of that is reserved for games that children and families would pay to use on their computers?
For example, this Fisher Price website has awesome games for students age infant to preschooler. But, on the page where the student would choose the game, there is no auditory description of what they could choose. Students would just be choosing games based on the picture icon and not the content. When you get into a game, like this one about opposites, the directions, prompts, and praise are accompanied by sound. That's an outstanding option for a non-reader or a beginning reader.
I know this feedback might sound very case specific, but if you think about it, a lot of students are unable to read until first grade. Even some second graders may be able to read well, but might not be totally confident with their abilities to do so on an unfamiliar site loaded with text (and blinking, moving ads in the margins, headers, and footers).
Finally, a lot of the kid friendly search engines weren't as forgiving with misspellings as good old Google. When I typed in "tomas tha tnk" (a pretend phonetic spelling of Thomas the Tank) on CyberSleuth Kids and Kids Click, no search results were found. I did have luck with AOL Kids and traditional Google. However, Google was the only site to automatically give me Thomas the Tank findings, without having to click on another hyperlink labeled Thomas the Tank.
Here are just some random other reflections/questions that I wrote down while reading. This part isn't very well formed, but I still wanted to throw it out to you all:
I did find it interesting that the tilde (~) symbol meant that a site was based on opinion. So that's something I'll definitely take with me in future research and Web surfs. It is curious that Blog URLs don't have tildes embedded in their text, but perhaps it's just to be assumed that content in Blogs is most often opinion based.
One thing I did wonder while reading was is .us follows as TLD extension when you search United States site in Europe or South America, for example? I never even thought to ask about that until going through the reading.
It's really wild that companies and groups can purchase words for web searches for their benefit. It reminded me a lot of pharmaceutical companies funding disease research so that their drugs will seem more useful or necessary. It really makes you wonder how easy it is to get solid, valid, straight, fact based answers about personal questions.
The kid friendly search engines mentioned in the text are certainly something to keep in my back pocket for use by my relatives and coworkers. I did decide, however, that it might be helpful if some of the kids search engines/websites "spoke" to searchers more. If my students were to roll over an icon, it would be great if that icon gave them ideas of what they could play with or learn from on a given page with an actual voice output. I can't imagine the time and effort it would take a web designer to set something like that up, but I bet a pro would say the idea isn't totally off the wall or unachievable. I guess a lot of that is reserved for games that children and families would pay to use on their computers?
For example, this Fisher Price website has awesome games for students age infant to preschooler. But, on the page where the student would choose the game, there is no auditory description of what they could choose. Students would just be choosing games based on the picture icon and not the content. When you get into a game, like this one about opposites, the directions, prompts, and praise are accompanied by sound. That's an outstanding option for a non-reader or a beginning reader.
I know this feedback might sound very case specific, but if you think about it, a lot of students are unable to read until first grade. Even some second graders may be able to read well, but might not be totally confident with their abilities to do so on an unfamiliar site loaded with text (and blinking, moving ads in the margins, headers, and footers).
Finally, a lot of the kid friendly search engines weren't as forgiving with misspellings as good old Google. When I typed in "tomas tha tnk" (a pretend phonetic spelling of Thomas the Tank) on CyberSleuth Kids and Kids Click, no search results were found. I did have luck with AOL Kids and traditional Google. However, Google was the only site to automatically give me Thomas the Tank findings, without having to click on another hyperlink labeled Thomas the Tank.
Here are just some random other reflections/questions that I wrote down while reading. This part isn't very well formed, but I still wanted to throw it out to you all:
I did find it interesting that the tilde (~) symbol meant that a site was based on opinion. So that's something I'll definitely take with me in future research and Web surfs. It is curious that Blog URLs don't have tildes embedded in their text, but perhaps it's just to be assumed that content in Blogs is most often opinion based.
One thing I did wonder while reading was is .us follows as TLD extension when you search United States site in Europe or South America, for example? I never even thought to ask about that until going through the reading.
It's really wild that companies and groups can purchase words for web searches for their benefit. It reminded me a lot of pharmaceutical companies funding disease research so that their drugs will seem more useful or necessary. It really makes you wonder how easy it is to get solid, valid, straight, fact based answers about personal questions.
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