Global Conversations

Steve Wheeler wrote a blog about global conversations, which I thought was a perfect topic relating to our project this week. He talks about how easy it is to communicate now and how well we are able to connect whenever we need to. Instead of a phone call, many people chose to face time eachother or skype one another. It is very interesting to think of how easy it an be to still have the face to face communication even if you are thousands of miles away. I definitely found it interesting to think about how different things are from just five years ago when it comes to technology. 

Twitter Experience

Overall I found the twitter experience to be kind of frustrating. Although it can be helpful to read a brief summary of something before you go in depth, I feel it is not very helpful to read 140 characters and have to click on extra links to understand where this person was coming from. I personally would prefer to read a blog where you can get a little more information, and understand completely what the person is trying to explain

Mobile Learning and Interaction

The blog I read this week really made me consider how much we do on the internet and how people skills are going down the drain. Although technology can be a very positive thing, it is important to consider what it is doing to people’s manners and interaction skills in general. We spend so much time interacting on the computer that it is often difficult to have a conversation and work in a group together. These are important factors of life that definitely need to be considered if you want to transform your classroom into completely technology based. Although these tools are good for home, in the classroom it is definitely important to have your students interact with each other so that way they do not lose their basic human skills.  Often children now have trouble looking each other in the eyes or even just having a conversation without being distracted from their iPod, the television, or the tablet that is around them. Although it is nice to stay connected, it is important to enforce boundaries for these things. 

Twitter Experience

Upon looking on twitter, there were several accounts that I thought would be useful for any teacher/ future teacher because it gives you feedback on approaches in the classroom and what the approaches actually are. The one I found most interesting and who posted a lot was Eric Sheninger. He is a very well known educator and has almost 50,000 followers. He posted a link on his twitter and it interested me because it was something that we talked about in class. The flipped classroom seemed to be a very good idea in their classroom. According to results, the teachers students scored about 5 points higher on their assignments because of the flipped classroom approach and many of the students seemed to like it a lot. It was interesting for me to see that students were actually excelling because I didn’t honestly think that I would like this approach as a student. It was very cool to see that the lessons could be brought home for extra help and then the students would not be frustrated.  

Mobile Learning

Steve Wheeler made a post about the ups and downs of mobile learning. Information is so easily accessed because of being able to download apps on your phones and tablets and it is so easily carried around. The most interesting thing he stated was about how you can never really disconnect from mobile learning. It’s like having a work phone for your job: you never can put it down. It’s hard to separate yourself from your mobile devices, so you are constantly being emailed and reminded about things that could potentially stress you out. Although it is nice being able to have this every time you need to ask a friend or professor questions about an assignment, they also have the liberty to send you other assignments and you never have the chance to get away from it.

You're not alone

Reading back on Patrick Black’s older posts, I discovered one that really interested me. My goal is to hopefully become an educator for special needs students. He is a parent of a special needs child. The child was just entering high school and he had many concerns about him. It is not stated what kind of disability this child had, but Black’s concerns were definitely something I think many special needs parents have when their child is growing up. He talks about how it is difficult for his child to grasp the concept of brushing his teeth, putting deodorant on, and keeping a decent appearance. In middle school, most kids stayed away from him because they did not want to be around his “grossness”. He talks about how he wants his child to put in contacts instead of having wobbly glasses, or chew gum instead of pencils, remote controls, or his calculator. He feels that this is the only way he could make friends. I do not think that changing your appearance to make friends is a good thing because being yourself is probably the most rewarding thing you can do for yourself, but if you don’t have good personal hygiene, you will definitely have trouble getting people to agree to be around you. I think that at school, his aid should carry extra deodorant on her for him to make sure that he does not smell. Since his son does not like chewing gum all that much because he does not like mint, maybe let him have tic tacs in class or a different flavor of gum. High school is definitely a tricky place to make friends, but it might help if the school has those buddy programs where it gives the students with disabilities to interact with other students their age. These allow for students to keep interacting so that way they can feel connected to others.

Expressive

Expressive is an app that is designed to help people with communication disorders such as autism and apraxia. This application gives the student the opportunity to express themselves using pictures or audio. You can choose the various voices for the audio part and it has proven to be a very effective application for children with communication disorders. The app is very easy to navigate and it offers a lot of learning opportunities for the children with the special need. The only big downfall about the app is that it is about $30.00. This is definitely a lot of money for an app but if you get good results from it, then I do not think money should be considered in this.

Learning For All

While looking for a good blog for my second blog to follow, I came across one called “Teaching All Students”. This blog is extremely helpful as a special education teacher because it gives you tips to use technology to aid the students while not singling them out in front of the other students.  The author of the blog gives dozens of app suggestions to use inside the classroom and gives full descriptions on how to use them. It is very helpful to find a blog like this because it is hard to just find an app without knowing if one of your students would not benefit from it.

http://teachingall.blogspot.com/