Blog #1

    Adaptive technologies can be very useful in the classroom. Smart boards are a great way to engage all students in your lessons, even letting those with disabilities participate very easily. There are many tools the smart board comes with that lets disabled children interact with the board so that way they are not being excluded, which could happen if you were using just a regular white board. Smart boards are also beneficial to gifted students to keep them engaged. Audio books are also very useful because it can help students who struggle with ready still be able to participate in lessons. I personally have not experienced any adaptive technologies in my classrooms, but I can imagine how they can bring about challenges. One major challenge I could see happening is a lack of training of the adult teaching the student how to use the new technology. If there is not proper training then the technology is of no beneficial use to the student.     PowerPoint is a very ...

What did you learn through your individual efforts? I learned about the opportunities and challenges that special needs students face. There are many challenges, like having to train the staff properly in order to help the student use new technology that is going to help them. Some very effective solutions to the challenges they face are National Council for Learning and TechMatrix. Also, an educators role is to make sure that all the students are receiving the same opportunities regardless of their disabilities. What did you learn today through creating/viewing the group presentations? I learned about all of the different types of technologies that diverse students can use while in the classroom. Some of these being switch devices, alternate keyboards, text-to-speech software, and digital books. What did you learn through viewing the bookmarks and annotations of others? Through viewing the annotations of others, I was introduced to many new forms of technologies for diverse stude...

    So far, I have enjoyed using twitter. I have a personal account for twitter, so using it for an educational use was a bit different. I definitely see the advantages, because you can easily connect with very educated people and find out lots of new helpful information that you may not have found out if you haven't had a Twitter.  I have learned way more about education than I expected to. The graduation rates and how using technology in the classroom can benefit students really surprised me. I have not yet experienced any issues with Twitter, but I think this is mainly because I was already familiar with the app and had a lot of experience.     I am not very far into my website so far, but I have learned how to use some of the functions on weebly. This is my first time I have tried to make a web page and I am enjoying it. I like how when you want to add something into your web page you can drag each item onto the page and it makes it very easy and simple to...

What did you learn today through your individual efforts? Today I learned more about how great of a tool Microsoft software can be. They provide many different resources to help teachers create their lessons such as PowerPoint. Microsoft software is also available for free to the majority of faculty members so it is a great tool to use! What did you learn today viewing the bookmarks and annotations of others? I learned of many new tools through viewing my classmates bookmarks and annotations. One of the new tools I learned was Dojo. Dojo is a great tool to use for behavior in the classroom. It lets you stay in contact with parents, and monitor a childs' behavior. This I could find to be very helpful in my classroom and I could see myself using Dojo when I am a teacher.

For my individual learning project, I made a prezi that lets people know a few reasons on why you should become a teacher. I only ever used prezi once before this, so I learned a lot while making this presentation. Below is a link to my prezi if you would like to check it out ! Prezi!!!

Jade Grassi, Brenna Carrigan, and Gavin Clark Contrast -Yes,the content on Mrs. Savages webpage is good. Most information is either black or white or garnet and white. I am clearly able to differentiate title, and actual information links. Repetition -Yes, similar visual elements are repeated throughout the webpage. She has subjects such as "daily schedule, field trip dates, and homework help" with the same font, size, etc. Also, when she presents the newsletters, the links are all similar. Alignment Yes, similar elements are aligned to represent a visual connection. There are two separate columns that makes it easy to differentiate between the tabs and the information. There is a specific margin between the tabs on the side and the information. Proximity Yes, visual elements are grouped together depending on what they are. For example, the tabs on the side are grouped together because all the information relates to those topics. After you click on that tab all th...