July 16th

Today we had class wherever we wanted to, using Blackboard Collaborate.  It was a good experience for me.  I found it was a little more intense than a regular classroom, because having the computer and the headphones forced me to concentrate on the class only.  As soon as I took off the headphones, I started noticing the space around me, the quality of the light, the sound from outside, the fan.  So that really made me think about my students for whom those external stimuli are overpowering, and how having a computer and headset can help them to focus on their tasks.  But the flip side, for me, was that the focus can take over.   You have to resurface from that digital world from time to time.

We had a nice debrief after the course (Lindsey, Mark, Simon and I), and discussed the classroom of the future.  When one child has an iPad for AT...then everyone in the class will want one.  And how can we deny them these tools, when they will clearly benefit everyone, not just students with diagnosed learning disabilities? And what are the ramifications of that?  Will we eventually lose our ability to read and write?  Will that matter?

The class content was on apps for helping writing.  We started out with a summary of the writing process.  Just like reading, it is hugely complex, and students can have difficulties at any of the stages.  I found the Occupational Therapy videos interesting - how children need to have good core strength and posture before they can have good handwriting.  We then looked at some more of the apps.  There is a student who I had last year, who I will have again next year, who is exactly that creative, idea-filled, vocabulary-filled writer...who can't spell well enough for anyone except me to read what she has written.  Co-Writer is the solution for her!

After class, we messed about with the speech recognition software on our computers.  If you speak clearly and remember to say "period" and "new paragraph" in the appropriate places, it does a pretty good job of writing what you say.  It is on all of our computers...who would have known?

Good day - I enjoyed the class!