Assistive Technology in Windows Vista

I have found a number of Assistive technologies built-in to Windows Vista. These tools are available to use on any Windows Vista operating system and they are easy to turn on and off. The settings provide customizable preferences so that users may create individualized features that cater to their own needs. Most of these are available in My Computer > Control Panel > Appearance and Personalization > Ease of Access Center.  Here are just a few of the many available options:

• Adjust the size of icons. This makes it easier to see  the visual elements in the windows.

• Adjust size, shape, speed, and color of pointer;  add tails. This helps make it easier to find and follow the pointer on the screen.

• Speech Recognition. Set up a microphone and use your voice to control the computer. It will respond to commands for menus, windows, and navigation and it will recognize the words you say and type them on the screen.

• On-Screen Keyboard. Use a keyboard on the screen to type. This helps if you are only able to use a mouse but you do not have the ability to type on a keyboard with your fingers.

• Text-To-Speech. Turn on a narrator that reads aloud any text on the screen and also vocalizes anything you click on.

Cyber-bullying

Case: You are a 4th grade teacher, and there has been three students in your school who have been the victims of cyberbullying outside of class.  You want to have a lesson that you hope will help students know what to do, how to avoid it, and possibly avoid it from happening as much as you can.

Description: We created a comic appropriate for 4th graders which explains what to do if they are the victims of cyber-bullying: print out the page as evidence and show it to an adult. We also discourage other students from becoming cyber-bullies themselves. This was created on www.toondoo.com.

Link to the comic on the web!

Professional Uses of Technology: PLNs

A PLN, or Personal Learning Network, is a learning community that provides support and resources for professional growth. I created a brief ”Prezi” presentation exploring the National Council of Teachers of English. NCTE is a resource for English, Literacy, and Language Arts teachers of all levels. It provides information on seminars, lesson plans, research, standards, professional development, and more. It is a great community to join because it allows teachers to communicate with each other, exchange ideas, discuss new information, and find resources for their classrooms. Members can receive updates via email or RSS feeds.

Link to my presentation (and my very first attempt at Prezi!): PLN — Prezi

Short Term Goals: Podcast, Gradebook, and Assistive Technology

In my Professional Development Plan, I created three short-term goals: To create a podcast, to create a gradebook using Micrsoft Excel, and to research current Assistive Technologies available to students with special needs. In this blog, I am documenting my completion of these three goals.

Short Term Goal #1: Create A Podcast. In order to create my own podcast, I decided to discuss the sleep cycle. I created a multidisciplinary approach to my English class’s discussion on Shakespeare’s Macbeth by connecting the sleep cycle to Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene. My podcast was created using PowerPoint and Windows Movie Maker.

The file can be downloaded by clicking here: Sleep Cycle Podcast

The podcast can also be viewed below:

 

Short Term Goal #2: Create A Gradebook.  To create my first gradebook using Microsoft Excel, I followed a wonderful online tutorial and modified it to fit my 8th grade English classroom needs. My gradebook has 20 students and 10 assignments. It automatically calculates each student’s grade, the class average for each assignment, and the class average for final grades.

My completed Gradebook can be found here: 8th Grade English Gradebook.

A screenshot of part of the gradebook:

 

Short Term Goal #3: Research Assistive Technologies. One of my goals was to learn about current assistive technologies that help students with special needs. This entailed researching available technological resources and organizing the information I found into a tangible reference tool. My goal was to create a chart documenting five different Assistive Technology tools, their functions, pictures, links, and types of special needs they assist with.

A link to the Word Document of the completed chart: Assistive Technology Tools

A screenshot of page 1 of the chart:

Classroom Communication Plan

As a middle school English teacher, I will need to be able to communicate with students, parents, and other teachers. For me, e-mail will be my primary communication device. However, I would definitely like to create a class website as a resource for students, parents, and other teachers to find answers to their questions without needing to directly contact me.

My class website will incorporate the following pages:

• Class Calendar — a monthly calendar of important dates such as holidays, half days, vacations, exams, field trips, and major projects. This will be useful for both students and parents to see what is coming up.
• Homework Calendar — this page will be divided by class periods and each class period will have their own homework schedule. Essentially, this will answer the question “What is due on each day this week?” It will be like a syllabus, but broken down weekly for on-the-spot editing. This will be useful for students to keep track of their assignments, but also for parents to see what kind of homework they should expect their child to bring home.
• Blog — “What did you do in school today?” “Nothing.” My blog will solve this problem that every parent faces! I will link to a class blog, where I will provide brief weekly updates on what material we are covering in the classroom. This will be especially relevant for parents who want to know what their students are learning. Also, it will help other teachers in my school and elsewhere see where my classes are in the curriculum so that we can collaborate on team projects.
• Contact — Here I will provide my e-mail address for parents, students, and other teachers to use.
• Forum – My website will contain a forum. This will be primarily for student use. Since I am teaching English, I would like to have out-of-class responses to writing prompts and discussions. For example, I would give the students a question over the weekend, and they would need to log on to the Forum and post a reply to the question. They could also see each others’ replies and comment on them.
• Resources – This page will contain links to worksheets, articles, permission slips, power points, and other resources that students may need in order to complete their homework. Some of these links will also be on the Homework calendar, but this page will be a collection of all of them organized by week.
• Twitter – I will show a twitter feed on my page where I can post announcements, reminders, updates, and encouragement to students, parents, and teachers.
• Grades — Parents and students can log in to view their grades.

Station 6: Persuasive Speaking Survey

Introduction: You are in Mr. Frank’s 9th grade Language Arts class, and your class is learning about persuasive writing and speaking. Since you live in Bloomington, Indiana, there is a debate about whether or not the 45/46 bypass should be redone to incorporate more lanes. Your group is charged with creating a persuasive (group) speech to convince the city that this project would or would not interfere with daily life. Your group has decided that you need to gain more information about how people feel about the idea of this change, their driving walking habits, and any information that you feel necessary to help convince people of your point.

I created a Google Form survey for my data collection and analysis tool.

Link to my Survey on Google Forms: 45/46 Bypass Survey

Screenshot of Form in Progress:

 

Screenshot of spreadsheet with answers:

Non-Verbal Activity Follow-Up

• Who was in your group (first names only)?
  – Kaitlyn (me), Kristin, and Aaron

• How did your group communicate?
  – We used the forum provided by Chip on Oncourse: Group 7 Google Groups, and we created our own thread called “Kaitlyn, Kristin, and Aaron.

• Name specific tools and how much/little you used that tool to communicate with each other.
  – The only tool we used was the forum on Oncourse.

• How (technology speaking) did this go?
  –Well, it was hard to follow along with everybody because forums are asynchronous. I had to refresh the page every couple of minutes to see if somebody responded. Then, I had to find the new response. Since some of us hit “reply” on the original post and others hit “reply” on other posts, the postings did not go in order from the top of the page to the bottom. So I had to scroll through all 19 of our messages and figure out which one I haven’t read yet.

• How (personally speaking) did this go?
  –Personally it was fine. We divided up the work immediately and we all posted the information for our designated part. Then we edited each others’ work and added our own ideas.

• Did you ever do anything like this before?
  –No, not in a classroom at least. I have never been in a classroom with my other group members and forced to use technology to complete a project without speaking.

• What did you like/not like about this experience?
  –I liked getting the experience of using a forum to do a group project. A lot of times I hear forums suggested as a technological tool that can be used for out-of-class group projects, and this gave us a good idea of how it would logistically work. I think it could work decently well for a project where you split up the work, but for something that needs to be really collaborative, I think a synchronous form of communication is much more helpful. I didn’t like having to post our page to the wiki– it was frustrating since only one person could be editing it at a time!

• What would you like to have done differently?
  –I would like to have tried an activity that my English students might actually be doing on a forum. Instead of reviewing a communication tool (Google Groups), I would rather be trying to do research on a specific author or something to that effect.

• What would the strengths and challenges be to doing this type of activity in the grade level/subject area you want to teach?
  –I want to teach 7th grade English. The challenges would include the disorganization of forums (like I said, the newest replies are not always easiest to find) and the asynchronous-ness of the information. The conversations can be hard to follow. The strengths are that it can be used outside the classroom, all group members can see what all other group members are saying and have done, all the information is in one place, and teachers can monitor the forums, give feedback, and evaluate if each student has posted his or her fair share of work.

Content Exploration Tool: Inspiration

I reviewed Inspiration specifically for the purposes of Language Arts (though it can be used for multiple content areas). It is a tool designed to help students express their thoughts in the form of concept maps, outlines, webs, side-by-side comparisons, and other charts. Students create visualizations of their ideas and information as they go through the process of brainstorming, organizing, outlining, and drafting. They use arrows, pictures, words, links, shapes, and text boxes which quickly switch to a written outline with just one click.

Inspiration can be used to create book comparisons, vocabulary webs, character analysis, and other pre-writing tools to help students plan out a variety of Language Arts projects. I think this is a great tool to help students organize their thoughts before writing out their actual assigment. It is essential that students have a plan so that their papers flow smoothly and stay focused.

A video overview of Inspiration is available online and tutorials can be seen as soon as the free trial is downloaded. There are also teacher webcasts and curriculum applications available under Inspiration Videos.

Other teachers have used this resource to create lesson plans, such as this one on writing persuasive papers. There are also entire lesson plan books available to purchase through the website.

Inspiration is an open-ended tool that helps student interact with the content of their language arts (and other subjects) projects and achieve their planning and pre-writing goals.

Teaching Resources: First Draft

In this blog I am compiling a list of Teaching Resources in a variety of areas: Lesson planning, assessments, professional organizations, teaching and learning videos, and technology tutorials. I am also going to examine why these are solid resources and whether they would help increase efficiency, effectiveness, or enhancement in my classroom.

• Lesson plans-
  http://www.webenglishteacher.com/index.html
  http://www.readwritethink.org/

Webenglishteacher includes a huge varity of lesson plan and activity categories, including drama, ESL, poetry, mythology, journalism, Shakespeare, speech, vocabulary, writing, reading, grammar, and even more. The activites are then sub-organized by authors, titles, and other more specific topics. Readwritethink includes not only lesson plans but also information on standards, student resources, and web resources for teachers to explore. The lessons are organizable by grade. Each lesson includes an overview, objectives, resources, preparation, instruction, activities, web resources, and the standards that the lesson helps to meet. These websites would be good resources for finding new activities to do in my classroom–they both have a large variety of topics and a plethora of lesson plans that I could personalize for my own use. This would help with my efficiency; I would not have to create all of my lesson plans from scratch, so I could get them done quicker. Also, if students have access to the resources online, it saves the time of printing everything as handouts.

• Assessment related-
  http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php

Rubistar is a simple tool to help teachers create rubrics. There are templates available in oral projects, multimedia, math, writing, products, reading, art, work skills, science, and music; it is also possible to create a rubric from scratch. The tool makes it easy for teachers to enter categories, grading scales, and descriptions of expectations. Teachers can save their rubrics, edit, and print them at their convenience. This also would help with my efficiency because using this tool to create a rubric saves time. It would help my rubrics be neater, more consistent,  and easier for students to read.

• A professional organization for my teaching specialty-
  http://www.ncte.org/

NCTE is the National Council of Teachers of English and it is geared towards teachers of English studies, Literacy, and Language Arts at all levels; elementary, middle, secondary, and college. It contains information about conventions, conferences, seminars, news, research, awards, resources, lesson plans, standards, professional development, and more. Teachers are able to communicate with each other about what they see on the website and lessons they are currently working on in their classrooms. Members can also receive e-mail updates. The organization is a great way to stay in touch with teachers from around the country and to stay updated on new information and articles that could affect teaching and learning in the English classroom.

• Teaching and learning related videos-
  http://www.teachertube.com/

Teachertube is a place to upload, browse, and share documents, audio files, videos, photos, and blogs. If teachers make a creative video to use as a teaching tool in their classroom, they are able to upload it onto this website and then other teachers can view it and use it in their own classroom. For example, one teacher may create a rap music video to help their students learn certain material; another teacher can then find this video and use it for their own students. There are all kinds of videos for teachers of every subject and every level. Using videos like this would help increase effectiveness in my classroom, because having visual/audio aids when trying to teach difficult material helps students learn and remember the material better, thereby increasing achievement.

• Technology tutorials-
  http://www.nortellearnit.org/technology/

LearnITteachIT is a website that offers free “educator-created and classroom tested technology tutorials for teachers and students.” The videos are brief and include step-by-step instructions as well as concrete examples. Topics include creating objects in flash, digital audio, digital ethics, the internet, imaging, networking, online safety, powerpoints, video creation, and web content creation. This is a great resource to  have a quick crash-course in a piece of technology that I may want to use even though I’m not familiar with it. It will help expand the resources available to me and my classroom.