Digital Blog #G

For this week's blog entry, I have chosen three very exciting concepts from chapter 10 in our textbook. Chapter 10 is titled "Promoting Success for All Students through Technology". Before I get into the meat and potatoes, I want to share some basic facts about students in the U.S., and the rest of the world also...



Now that you've had a chance to look at some statistics on my emaze presentation, let's discuss what a Universal Design for Learning is. Referred to as "UDL", a universal design for learning is a way for schools to give all students, including students with disabilities, individualized options but without taking anything away from their education or from the teacher's lesson plan. While some plans change the amount of questions on classwork or homework in order for disabled students to "keep up" with the rest of the class, a UDL only modifies the work. This means that the students with disabilities do not miss out on anything that is taught. They are given equal work and therefore, given equal ability to learn!

MDGovpics on Flickr / Creative Commons Google Images

When I was a young person in a classroom, students with disabilities were given shorter tests, less homework, or simplistic assignments. While most of the class felt that the disabled students were being treated fairly, or even a little lucky at times, the truth is that they were being discriminated against (even if it was by ignorance) and they were being cheated out of an equal opportunity for learning!

By using a UDL, students with disabilities are learning much in the same ways as if a teacher were planning out lessons for multiple intelligences... lessons will include verbal, visual, tactile, and technological elements in order to include every single member of the class.
To build your own UDL, visit this web site : http://lessonbuilder.cast.org . 

• There is also a set of suggestions on the lesson builder site which include wonderful things like ebooks that you can add hyperlinks into so your students can research more on the subjects of the books they read or learn more about the characters of their favorite books!

Assistive Technologies is the second section of chapter 10 that I want to focus on this week.  First of all, I want to say that most of us might not realize that we probably use some form of assistive technology even if we do not have a disability. Calculators are considered assistive technologies. Your car's G.P.S. (global positioning system) is also an assistive technology... and a very useful one if you get lost easily like I do. In fact, a microphone, the zoom button on a document, and sites like Grammarly.com and Thesaurus.com are all kinds of assistive technologies.
As a person who is hearing impaired (single-sided deaf), I always tried to secure a seat in the front row of my classes. When that was not possible, I had a very difficult time keeping up with my work. In addition to that, even when I was sitting in the front row, if the teacher moved around a lot and did not face me throughout the lesson, I would lose large chunks of his or her instructions. Consequently, I spent a lot of time fidgeting in my seat, trying to gain a better vantage point. I simply refused to wear my bulky hearing aid and at that time, hearing aids did not come in the wonderfully undetectable sizes that they do now. Had I really thought about all of the assistive technologies that I

en.wikipedia.org / creative commons Google image

was already using in my classes, I may have been less concerned with the size of my hearing aid! But these days, we have a wide selection of assistive technologies for both students with disabilities and students without. Everyone can benefit from one form of technology or another, and as we see from the above examples, not every assistive technology is a big machine or even something we think of as such. They are all around us, part of our daily lives.




Lastly, and because when all is said and done I have a strong desire to be a Language Arts teacher, I want to cover the section of chapter 10 about Technology and Writing.
"Students at every grade level say they do not enjoy writing in school..." (Maloy), but this is a battle that I believe educators can win; I believe they can win this battle using technology! As we learned in a previous chapter of the textbook, students today are reading and writing up to 60% more than they have in past decades (Maloy), yet they are saying that they do not like to read and write. This is confusing unless we look at what these modern students are reading and writing. The answer is social media posts, tweets, text messages, blogs, and things of that nature. They are not necessarily writing long stories or essays as we would instruct them to do in school, but they are writing something, and as my favorite language arts teacher once told me in fourth grade, "If you can write something, anything, you can write a novel".

Brett Jordan on Flickr.com / creative commons Google

I think that the answer to a student's reluctance to write is to explain to them that they have been writing all along, and then give them permission to continue to write in the same ways that they are used to and comfortable with. If a student is familiar with and happy updating their social media on their phone, let's let them use their phone to "update" their ideas a little bit at a time online. If a student enjoys tweeting, we should allow them to create their essay outlines in a series of tweets. After all, it does not matter if their ideas come to us on paper or online as long as they are producing ideas, right? And with the way technology has advanced recently, there are programs students can use to speak into a microphone and the computer program will transcribe their words for them. Some programs will even transcribe a person's voice in cursive or translate it into another language. There are endless programs for pre-writing, drafting, editing, and even publishing now. The possibilities are endless.



Resources:

Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.
Category:Creative Commons - Wikimedia Commons. (n.d.). Retrieved October 18, 2015. 
"Flickr: Creative Commons." Web. 18 Oct. 2015.
"Find Creative Commons Images in Google Image Search." Web. 18 Oct. 2015