#7 Blog

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Assistive technology is "technology that help people with disabilities more effectively with computer equipment." There are alternate input and output devices for learners that cannot fully use the functioning computer equipment. A few examples of these assistive technologies are: a track stick instead of a mouse, a voice recognition, a magnified screen, reading text, or Brale keyboards. In the textbook, they mention writing technologies (people with cerebral palsy for example), reading equipment, text-to-speech software, Apple Touch devices, and many others. I have a friend that had a traumatic brain injury, so she uses an Apple Touch device to answer questions, talk, and play games that help her brain function. One game that she uses is a game that she touches a picture and it says the word. This helps her slowly process simple words again. In the classroom, adaptive technology might be hard because I would need to make sure all of the software for each student is up-to-date. Also, it will be hard for me to help each student on a different technology throughout the day. 

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Weebly is a website I have heard of before, but had never worked with. It took me a good amount of time to figure out what needs to be put into the website and how I need to put it in there. It was very hard to learn how to put the calendar in, probably spending an hour because Tockify wouldn't let me load it and Google Calendar was giving me a lot of troubles. If I could improve for next time, I would like to change my home page a little. Also, a little more assistance would be very helpful. Otherwise, this was a great assignment to learn how to make a website for my future classroom. I will most likely be using a website to provide my students and their parents with all of the homework and announcements for the week. 

Samantha's Kindergarten Class

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Diigo is a website that I had never heard of or used before. After using it for just a few weeks, I have learned so much. Finding sites and being able to post them somewhere with key words is great for teachers to interact quickly and find exactly what they are looking for. With a common "dictionary," it will be very easy for team members to post things and find similar sites easily. This is a great website for my future classroom and professional efforts to quickly be able to find the websites that I thought would be useful to my students.