Learning Made Accessable

The students, not the teacher, rule a classroom. The students who have been dismissed for ages as difficult learners are not at fault for their inability to grasp the concepts presented to them. Whether or not these children have any sort of disability, it is the curriculum that has been disabling productive, active learning in classrooms. With the technology teachers have available to them today, they can adapt their teaching methods to provide for the different learning styles of their diverse group of students.
According to the CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology) website, located at http://www.cast.org/publications/UDLguidelines/version1.html, the organization’s goal is to “create built environments and tools that are useable by as many people as possible.” The classroom is not just a place where the teacher creates the classroom environment and develops a curriculum based around what works best for him or her; in fact, it is a location that must be adaptable and useable for approximately 20 uniquely different learners. A classroom should be accessible to students with physical disabilities, students with mental handicaps, and even children who are gifted and talented. Creating an inclusive environment is much easier with the help of technology like individual headsets, large print readers, and descriptive films. I think going into a computer lab and having everyone put on headphones while looking at a web page on the habitats of the Amazon jungles would be an ideal way of employing assistive technology. The students who just need to concentrate on reading can use the headphones to block out excess noise, while students who need help with pronouncing the new vocabulary can have the website read to them as they listen through headphones.
America has implemented the No Child Left Behind Act in order to get students on the same level. The amendment of the Rehabilitation Act, as described in Section 508, ensures that the technology will be there for students with disabilities who would otherwise be left behind. I fully intend to make this law work for me as a teacher so that I can offer assistive technology in my classroom. I believe that whether or not a child has disabilities, they should have options as to how they are presented with curriculum materials. It is highly unlikely that I will not have someone requiring special needs of some sort in my classroom, and the Federal assistance that would be available to them could be used to help the entire class.
The Maine State Library (MSL) offers a variety of outreach services that allow for people who are blind, or who are reading impaired, to utilize talking book programs, large print books, and descriptive video. These tools allow the student to keep up with and enjoy the same readings as the rest of the class. The descriptive videos supplement the dialogue going on in the film, giving a more in depth description of the actions that can be heard, but not seen. Some descriptive videos even have to do with math, history, and science. Because there are so many different learning styles in one classroom, I see no reason not to use descriptive videos with a class that really has no evident physical challenges. Hearing the narrator spell out the steps of dividing fractions AND hearing the description of the physical placement of each number as it is manipulated would be invaluable to learners who need that audio-visual reinforcement.
While many teachers might see registering for the MSL’s outreach assistance as time consuming and frustrating, the fact is that having this technology to assist their students will make teaching their class far easier in the end. Teachers who work with their students’ disabilities instead of following their own agendas will have to appreciate how well the class is able to flow. Imagine one less student having to leave for a Special Education class because he or she can just follow along with assistive technology? It is possible, and it is the responsibility of today’s teachers to use assistive resources to everyone’s advantage.

Second try

Learning isn’t easy! Students today must take in and process substantial amounts of information while keeping up with the demands and distractions of their fast paced world. But teaching isn’t easy either! Teachers have the challenge of engaging their students to the point where they can focus on the material at hand, imbibing information and exploring new ideas and concepts. A lack of communication between the two sides of the educational spectrum has the potential to create a technological barrier, often making teaching and learning irrelevant and inefficient. Teachers and students must work together, using the latest technology and sharing individual skills and interests in order to create an educational environment that is both effective and exciting.

As technology first started to appear in the classroom, the students were the ones eager to venture into the new realms of opportunity that the Internet and its many applications presented. Teachers, still teaching the importance of neat handwriting and independent research in the library, were weary of a technological dependency that would erase mental math, proper vocabulary / spelling, and intensive research from their curriculums forever more. However, it is clear that in using the alternative medias technology has to offer, students and teachers have actually found ways to learn together, and gain deeper insights than those neatly phrased in textbooks.

In the article entitled “Write the Truth” (2007), a fifth grade teacher was presented with a teaching moment when his class wondered how many of the presidents of the United States owned slaves before deciding that slavery really was not such a good thing. The students, when asked what should be done to uncover the truth, were eager to check history books and the Internet. What they found was unsettling, even to these young students. Nowhere in their history text was any mention of racism or national leaders who subscribed to the practice. By employing detailed searches on well-known search engines, the students were able to develop a list of slave-owning presidents. The students were distressed that the textbook writers did not want them learning the harsh reality about the revered leaders, and took action to ask that the text be revised and clarified. In this scenario, the Internet was a valuable tool and allowed the students to actively participate in deeper learning.

In the same way, two sister elementary school classrooms from Canada and Greece were communicating with each other online in order to learn more about the opposite culture. The article “DiaLogos: A Sister Class Exchange between Greece and Canada” (2007) explains that amidst an effort to provide more information on Ancient Greece, a student realized that some of the Parthenon’s wreckage was unfairly named for the British lord who took them. This spurred the class in Greece to write to the editors of the magazine who had published this erroneous information. The confidence that this effort provided the students must have helped them to recognize the power they had as individuals to take a stand and make a difference – and it might not have happened if the intrigued Canadian student had not emailed that question across an ocean.

If teachers and students today can work together to close the gap between “old school” teaching methods and newer technological resources, a common ground may be found. This common ground allows for the “Type II” teaching methods, (as described in the article “Do Something Disruptive” on Mike Muir’s blog page) including podcasts, graphing calculators, and word processors, to engage young students with materials and medias they are familiar and comfortable with, while enabling teachers to encourage a deeper exploration of age old concepts. Teachers who are able to show their students that Ipods and You-Tube are for more than just music and videos will have provided their students with effective and exciting learning tools that can be used anytime, anywhere.

Technology and Learning in Today's World

I just learned how to do a new post!

Lesson #1

As a first time blogger, I don't really know what I'm doing. I have always been scared to post information online, but I'm sure this will be a good educational tool more than anything else. I really hope that this semester goes well, and that by the end of this class, I will be able to use computers in ways I never could have dreamed of.