Wednesday, September 19, 2007
The article that I found deals with how technology has the wonderful ability to assist students with learning disabilities. Teaching can be modified and adapted to all students in order to increase knowledge and motivation. As we know technology does not deal with only computers. The devices the articles mention consist of hearing aids, glare-reduction screens, Braille note-taking devices, voice-recognition software, and computers where students can control the movement with their eyes. The article also mentions how on-line resources are available to educators in order to help with students that might benefit from these different forms of technology. However, the only downfall of these technological uses is that they required various amounts of training. Without the teacher completely understanding there is no point in trying to introduce the use to someone else. Therefore, how do we find a happy medium here where the teacher can be absent from the classroom long enough to be fully knowledgeable about the technologies that are available? In addition to that, how do we ensure that the appropriate amount of funding is available to train a good portion of teachers will to train on this topic?
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3 comments:
These are good questions, Katie. Did the article provide any suggestions? It is a definite problem - affording the technology and also having the time to learn all about it.
It is an amazing time with all the new technology. Hopefully, one day someone will come up with some answers...
Wow Katie, you do make some very good points with this article. I haven't really heard of any of these means to assist students with learning disabilities, but what a great way to incoporate technology into the classroom. These would be great resources for students and teachers to incoporate into the classroom and really assist all learners. However, money and training do always seem to get in the way. These resources could be very beneficial for our students and would be something that I could see being incoporated into many IEP's. The on-line resources that you mentioned would be great for inclusion facilitators to explore. In addition, if they received the special training and then brought it back to the teachers I think everyone could benefit.
I agree, nothing is more embarassing than trying to teach someone to use something that you are not sure of yourself. I can understand some of the difficulty in training though, as you said there are so many different types of equipment in use.
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