Blog Post 3

Technology in Special Education

Lacy Cook's video was about how technology has impacted how special education class run. The video showed some areas where simple problems affected students and how to solve them such as cards with the alphabet printed on them; a simple platform for a book to sit on; and how there was one student who needed quite reading time alone in the hallway..

Being able to use computers in class have greatly increased the amount of work that could be done by these students in class. A basic computer, something that is often taken for granted, really helps some of these students to accomplish something that would have been impossible without one. Audio books allowed the same student, who had to have his books read to him in the hall, stay in the classroom with the other students. Audio books are an effective solution for students who are easily distracted by noise. This video has shown me many different ways that technology can be used for I never would have thought of using.


iPad Apps in the Classroom



After thinking about what would help students who have trouble reading in the How the Ipad works with Academics for Autism and searching the app store, I decided "Vocabology" would be a great app to use with special needs students. It's an app that helps students build their vocabulary with words that they wouldn't learn in every day conversation.
It seems pretty simple, and it is that's the beauty of it it. It teaches students new words and allows them to look up words they might not know. This will allow them to build their vocabulary without asking out loud what it means. Some students are so shy about sounding link they aren't smart that they wouldn't ask the meaning of a word.


Gary Hayes Social Media Count

I am not as surprised by these numbers as I would have believed. In the last minute seconds over 750,000 items have been shared on Facebook, not at all surprising considering some of the people I know who spend hours a day on Facebook. I am extremely curious as to how this information is gathered. I am sort of surprised that over five hundred Facebook account has been made in the last minute. The only thing that would make that make sense to me is the fact that a page is made for every new media that is made.

I don't see how this would affect me as a teacher. Should it show me how much time people spend online instead of communicating in person. Perhaps high school will become like college, with almost all classes having at least part of their material online. It seems to me that over time elementary schools will become like what college classes are now.


Michael Wesch: A Vision of Students Today

This perfectly shows how college class are now. In class it is almost impossible for me to resist the urge to visit a social media site or just surf the internet. I want to pass all of my classes, but its hard to care about something you know you won't need to know for your future career. It depresses me how little work I do and still make great grades in my classes., yet stress over it more the classes I actually need.

Classes fill up students' lives with completely unneeded information they will be hard pressed to remember. Teachers also suffer because of this. They become teachers to help students learn, but if they are forced to teach students who obviously don't care about the information all it does is make the teacher want to stop teaching. If students only had to take classes they had some intreast in it would raise GPA's across the board. Well that's my thought anyway.