Assistive Technology in the Classroom

Reading through this week assigned articles, I realized how little I know about assistive technology. hopefully, I will learn as much as possible about AT during this semester and will set to look for a training program to help me gain more knowledge and skills in using assistive technology in my classroom, I want to be prepared for any students that I might get that will benefit from AT and want to be knowledgeable enough to help that child learn. In the matter of few days I already read about and learned about many available gadgets that help children with special needs; however I don't just want to know about these gadgets, I want to be able to implement them and to know where to get them when they are needed.

Have you taken a course that trained you on AT? If yes, was it informational and would you suggest it for others?

Assistive Technology in the Classroom

Reading through this week assigned articles, I realized how little I know about assistive technology. hopefully, I will learn as much as possible about AT during this semester and will set to look for a training program to help me gain more knowledge and skills in using assistive technology in my classroom, I want to be prepared for any students that I might get that will benefit from AT and want to be knowledgeable enough to help that child learn. In the matter of few days I already read about and learned about many available gadgets that help children with special needs; however I don't just want to know about these gadgets, I want to be able to implement them and to know where to get them when they are needed.

Have you taken a course that trained you on AT? If yes, was it informational and would you suggest it for others?

Can I Use Blogs with My 2nd Graders?

Well… I really do not know the answer to my own question. Until I signed up for this class, I did not even think about blogging, let alone using it for my class. While reading chapters 1-3 in Richardson's Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts (2010), I started to realize what a great tool “blog” can be in an educational setting. I started to see how the children who are so used to getting things “right now” will benefit from having blogs to communicate with their teachers.

Now that I see how beneficial blogs can be in a classroom, I am having hard time figuring out how I can do that in my second grade classroom. I have been searching web for answers and I found many educational blogs that are geared towards older students, blogs that are helpful/useful for teachers, and I even found blogs that are geared towards younger kids. The more I read, the more I see the world of endless possibilities; however, I don’t know how to implement it. Some of my students don’t even have an access to internet and they will need some accommodations. At first I was worried about the ones who are not great at writing/typing, but if they can produce a research paper, I think they can share their thoughts in a sentence.

I was thinking of questions that I can post for the students to discuss and I definitely want those questions to be meaningful experience for my students. “Checking for understanding” type of questions would be one way to start them blogging, but what else?

Do you have any other ideas, questions, discussions points that I can use in a blog with my second graders?     

I can say this is my first experience with blogging. My brother is very active in political arena and has a blog which he updates daily. I visited it only when he sent me the link and asked me to read his post. I probably did that 3 times in the last year. So, that was my only encounter with blogs. Now that I have created my own blog, I can see how it makes sharing ideas and thoughts more accessible.  Truthfully, it did not take long to create my own blog. After reading the assigned chapters and getting warmed up with the idea of having a blog of my own, I looked at some examples, played with a few templates, and came up with my very own first blog J. As I mentioned, making the blog wasn’t hard, however, I am still having issues with figuring out RSS feed. For some reason, my blog dashboard does not look anything like the ones in the “Setting up your RSS tutorials”. I have tried everything and cannot figure it out. If you have an idea on what am I doing wrong, please let me know.  

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog! I am very excited to start my first blog. Let's get started on this journey.