Assistive Technologies for Reading

The authors, both Special Education instructors at eh University of Kentucky, carefully promote reading (and writing) assistive technologies for students with learning disabilities. They make the case that too often “regular” educators (as opposed to special education educators) do not know of readily available, easy to use technologies that can greatly assist students with learning disabilities. Such technologies can “break down barriers to full literacy in two ways: as a reading support” to help students “successfully access grade-level text as they read, and as a reading intervention, meaning that the technology helps students strengthen and improve their overall reading skills.”

See the full review by clicking here.

The Overdominance of Computers

Lowell Monke’s article “The Overdominance of Computers,” does more than take a critical look at the role of technology in the classroom. The author makes a strong argument for using the classroom, particularly at the elementary level, as a platform for increasing children’s internal and external capacities for human-based interaction. While quick to explain that technology should not be eliminated from today’s curriculum, the author argues that we must better understand our world and ourselves in order to better use the fruits (technologies from the mundane to the exotic) of our growing technological world. Furthermore, the greater the technology, the more removed we are from its tangible results, the greater the need for such understanding. Education can, and should, be a vehicle for such understanding.

Read a full reflection on the article by clicking here.

YouTubed!

Well, I finally did it! I posted an iMovie about my educational philosophy on Youtube. Yikes! It's my first iMovie, and it shows! It was pretty challenging putting the video together. IMovie is an intuitive program, and the video looks a lot better than when I first put it together. Still, there are some technical issues that I could not resolve.

My educational philosophy has certainly changed over the past year of student teaching, and I am still establishing its contours. In short, this "movie" feels a lot like a "snapshot." I greatly appreciated the opportunity to put something into "print," or "movie" in this case. It forced some intangible thoughts onto a canvass, where I can re-examine and re-contour them as my teaching evolves.

View my educational philosophy video by clicking here.

Websites I Dig

Check out a few of my favorite U.S. History links!

Click here to see the list.