Assignment 4 Assistive Technology

Computer Tools to assist those who have difficulty accessing and reading information on line

One of the things I struggle with the most is using the Internet with my low readers and students with reading comprehension skill. I am always looking for ways to help them access information from websites. I have experience using lots of assistive technologies and unfortunately most students are embarrassed to use them. I have a visually impaired student that the district paid to have a magnifying device like the Intel reader device and he only will use it at home. My hearing impaired students will not bring their amplifying boxes to class so they can hear the teachers lectures. It is insane but there you go. I love the 1 click download from answer.com site and can’t wait to tell my students about it. I am also writing a note with the information on it to send home to parents. I am also going to try to contact some of my former students that I know is now trying to make it in college classes. Because I am aware of so many different costly assitive technologies and my district has provided us with many of them I am choosing to research free and low cost technology to use with not only my special ed students but those gray area students as well.

My blog will be an assistive technology resource blog that teachers can look to for quick and easy ways to help the students access Internet and other reading materials.

1. Teachers and web designers who create educational material for online access can help by following these 5 steps for designing accessible web sites at http://www.ataccess.org/rresources/web/5firststeps.html
2. If you want to test your web site you can run it by Bobby at http://www.cast.org/bobby
3. Teacher/educational sites can use readability formulas to assist low readers. Microsoft Word has one in the spelling and grammar function. Click on Tools than Options and then click on the spelling & grammar tab. Under grammar click and check the readability statistics. When you do spell check after making corrections it will give you the readability statistics of your text.
4.Provide barriers for people with vision difficulty. See suggestions at http://www.ataccess.org/rresources/web/vision.html
5.Provide barriers for people with hearing difficulty see http://main.wgbh.org/wgbh/access/index.html
6. Free Assistive Technology Software: Izoom web, Wordtalk, Letmetype, System Access to Go, Power Talk, ClickNType. http://wac.osu.edu/conferences/emrc08/free_at.html7. Bookshare Reading Tools: http://www.bookshare.org/readingTools
8. Read Please software http://www.readplease.com/
9. Free Read Please downloads http://software.informer.com/getfree-read-please-software-review/10. Students often have difficulty typing in URLs so sites like http://tinyurl.com helps with creating shorter URLs for students to use when ask to go to a certain site. Also, at http://fur.ly site you can attach several websites all in one URL.
11. Sites like Keepandshare.com and Ikeep bookmarks.com help student manage and easily bookmark sites to review as needed.
12. Glogsters.com is a creative way for students with low writing skills to create information from web sites linking them to pictures.
13. One very helpful site that can be use to assist students in learning is livebinders.com. I use it to keep things together also.

With all the budget cuts I am always looking for free assistive technology that can be used in the classroom. Ease of use is important not only for students but for teachers. Training teachers is costly and time consuming. We have very little time these days for leaning new things. If you would like to see the Writer's I use with my students check out this site. http://writerlearning.com/

Week 6 On-Line Post Assistive Technology

Assistive Technology:

I taught severely mentally and severely multiply impaired students for 7 years from 1987 to 1995.
I used many different assertive technologies. Most of them were different types of communications systems like Wolfs and speech boards. It is so interesting to see how technology has advanced from the homemade pictures boards to the Wolf and now the computerized touch screens. I bet the homemade pictures boards are still used more than the advanced technology systems because of cost and teacher training.

From 1995 to present I teach emotionally impaired, learning disabled, mild cognitively impaired students, hearing impaired students, visually impaired students, physically and otherwise health impaired, ADD, ADHD Students, students with autism and Aspergers syndrome . I currently use hearing amplifier devices, Vista Vibe reading devices with CDs, books on tape, and Writer’s which are replacing Alphasmarts that I have used in the past. I have one student that uses the Writers for all his work. He has poor writing skills and lack of fine motor skills so he types everything into the Writer than transfers work to the computer and prints it from there. One of my two visually impaired students uses a high tech portable magnifier to help with reading. I have received extensive training throughout the years in assistive technology. A good resource that I use is Wayne ATRC. Check out Judy P. Page. http://www.judyphelps.net/index.htm. Our special ed dept. had an in-service from Wayne ATRC. Dr. Tarrant-Parks did a presentation on Premier Literacy Tools. For more information go to http://www.readingmadeez.com.

I learned from the EDU Assignment blog the 1 click answer download from answer.com. I believe this site could help all students. We have so many students that fall into the gray area which means they receive little help. This site is awesome because it fills a gap in student learning. I am going to show it to my new assigned class General Education Introduction to Technology.

UDL
I think the biggest drawback is training for teachers. I don’t see much of this happening and now with budgets cuts professional development will be the first to go and we will receive little training. We just had a professional development on differential instructions and because I teach special ed I had a good understanding as well as training already in this area. I noticed the older staff members appeared to be bored out of their minds with the presenter and the topic. My biggest complaint as a special ed teacher is that (at least at my school) the general ed teachers feel it is the special ed teachers’ responsibility to make accommodations and modifications for the special ed students. This is simply not true. The IEP mandates that all teachers who have contact with the special ed students are responsible for following the student’s IEP and making the accommodations and modifications determined necessary by the IEP team. There are so many gray area students out there that could benefit from UDL. Many teachers feel it is unfair for special education students to receive modifications and accommodations because the other students don’t receive them. If they could see that all students learn differently and it is our responsibilities as teachers to help students learn, our test scores would go up and students would enjoy learning more. I think all teachers should read “Classroom Instruction that Works” by Robert J. Marzano, Debra J. Pickering, and Jane E. Polluck .
It is research-based strategies for increasing student achievement. On Tuesday, December 15, 2009, I am presenting a New Teacher In-Service on Accommodations in the classroom for special ed students. This in- service is open to all teachers but is mainly for the new teachers in the district. I wish it included older teachers in the district because our new teachers have a better understanding of the needs of special ed students than the older teachers. Check out my livebinder for this training. I added some of the links from the assistive technology part on the EDU Blog. http://livebinders.com/play/play?id=4709

Assignment 3

For teaching subject areas like Government and Economics my computer needs are pretty basic. I use the computer for taking attendance, creating documents for my class, show united streaming videos and PowerPoint’s. My students have access to computers on charts and we have a mini computer lab for them to work on creative projects as needed.

I choose the Inspiron 537 to build and purchase for my classroom. The starting price was $249.00.
The computer comes in several colors but basic black will meet my needs.
I upgraded my processor from Intel Celeron 450 to Intel Cor 2 Duo Processor 6mb. I thought it would be best to upgrade because the speed of the processor could be important when downloading video streams. I took the Windows 7 operating system because the operating system that came with the computer at no cost was Windows Vista. I am not really familiar with Vista and therefore not attached to it. Windows 7’s touch screen interests me because I teach special ed and I thought this would assists students with fine motor skill deficits.

I opted for the 1-year warranty in hopes that our tech person will be able to fix anything minor that goes wrong with the computer after a year. For security software I took the trial pack because I can download security software cheaper later. Microsoft Works comes with the basic price but I want to upgrade to Microsoft Office Small Business 2007. My students will use Word and Excel the most. I went with 320 GB ATA Hard Drive and 3GB of memory because most of my materials can either be stored on an external drive or the server.

The basic 17” wide screen monitor works fine for my classroom needs. I have a projector that I can hook up to my computer if I need the students to see anything on the screen. I will need a CD/DVD burner to burn CD’s of students projects and portfolios. I selected the basic integrated Intel Video Card because I will not need the ATI Radeon card. My current computer has an integrated video card and it meets my needs at this time. The same is true with the sound card. I ordered the Dell AX210 stereo speakers because I will need them for bigger sound when I show videos in the classroom.

I purchased a media card reader and wireless card because may need to have a way to save my files to transport them onto another computer. I don’t know if I really needed the wireless card but chose it anyway just in case the district decides to go wireless in the next couple of years. My choices would be a little different if I was purchasing this computer for home. I would upgrade the hard drive and memory as well as the video card because I store more graphics and pictures on my computer at home. My final cost of the computer is $982.00.

Online Class Assingment

I found the article “The True Cost of Ownership” By, Jamie McKenzie be very helpful if I had to set up a computer lab and purchase other technology. As a teacher I have spent most of my time preparing curriculum to teach my students. I have given little thought about all the costs to maintain and own our school's technology. Our district is privileged to have five technology support personnel. We have one at each building and one to oversee each of them. I think our school does a great job in planning our equipment. We have a committee that meets once a month to review technology issues. The committee is open to anyone in the district that wants to participate. This committee develops plans for professional development training. Last year they sent an online survey for all teachers to complete so that they could assess the teachers' need for technology training.

I don’t have to worry about setting up my classroom with technology. Our technology people do that for us. We tell them what we want and they order it ( if approved by the district). We have many different models of printers. Its seems that when they replace one printer it is always different from the ones we have. I don’t think this is cost effective especially when they take different cartridges. It's difficult to determine ahead of time how many you might need, and it can be more costly to service so many different models. Doing the TCO worksheet on the different printers was helpful. Before, I didn't give much thought how much it cost to print a page. Now I think twice before printing something.

After reading the article, I now have an objective standard to use when purchasing a classroom projector. I know what lumens are and how to use them when comparing projectors for classroom use.

EDU5250 Online assignment Links