7. Technology and Learning Disabilities

PowerPoint is a great tool that many teachers use in their daily lessons. In fact, almost all of my teachers use PowerPoint to teach their lessons. Blooms Taxonomy was created to promote higher forms of thinking in education. Let’s say I was teaching a class a lesson about the cardiovascular system, I could use each learning domain in a different slide to go through my lesson. This is especially important with science experiments and social experiments.

Adaptive technologies are technologies designed to help students with special needs. Students who deal with technology and physical disabilities can use technology to help them learn better. Students who cannot read or are blind can use voice recognition software to input information and they can also use text to speech software to output information. I have used both of these software’s. I often use Siri to type my messages when I am driving or just too lazy to type out a long text and my car also reads my text messages to me when I’m on the road so I don’t look at my phone. There are some problems with voice recognition software; maybe the software doesn’t understand you fully and mistypes. There are also problems with text to speech software like maybe it mispronounces something. Not only those things but students should learn how to type and how to spell. If I used adaptive technology like the voice recognition software all the time, my students wouldn’t learn how to spell or type.

This week’s assignment, web page design, was kind of a tough one for me. I really struggled with trying to figure out my way around the website. All the different options were just super confusing to me and I easily got frustrated when it wasn’t doing what I wanted. I couldn’t figure out how to add a picture for so long. But, in the end, I started to get the hang of it and actually began to enjoy it. I was having fun making my very own website. Although I do wish the website we were using had a tutorial or a walk-through of how to use each tool and what each tool did. I think that creating websites is something I will definitely be having my students do. In our current society, we look up everything on google, and we click on websites to find our answers. Creating those websites ourselves would not only be a fun experience but it would also give my students a chance to see just how much work goes into making those websites we visit every day. Not only that but as a teacher I think it is vitally important to have a class website so that the parents can check on the student. With a class website the parents are able to see what the student is doing that week, sometimes even see pictures of the students working, and receive announcements about upcoming events. You can check out my website I made here.