Open Doors

It's easy to say that assistive technology is opening doors for everyone. Indeed people take advantage and under appreciate the things laptops and computers do for them. For people with disabilities, technology has provided lee way for pursuing their dreams. I've had personal experience with people with disabilities with the privilege of being able to oversee a special education class for ED192. I was able to learn about how to teach special education and saw the difficulty of having to go back and forth with the lesson because students aren't always on the same level of learning. I can definitely see how technology can play a major role in a student's education and for student's with disabilities, communication can be accomplished. During my observation of the special education class, and throughout my experience in public school, students with disabilities are given one-to-one aides. Those aides are there to of course, help the student. Now, because some students with disabilities are unable to write or draw or talk, we can't really tell if the student is learning or not. The aide would then do the work for them or hold their hand and move it for them. With the technology we have now, wouldn't it be nice to implement it into schools and further the learning process. If we can have the student progress academically and show their work, it would be a amazing improvement for them. I suppose, the next problem would be the cost of all these updates. As written in an online article, "schools are forever playing technological catch up as digital innovations emerge that require upgrading schools' technological infrastructure and building new professional development programs." I'm certain that the government would be able to see how well students do with the new technology and can't resist providing the funds needed for the equipment. If this is already being utilized in the states, I believe Guam needs to jump on that bandwagon and implement it in our public schools.

*This blog is in response to this video

Online sources:

(2011 September 1) Technology in Education edweek.org Retrieved 21 March 2014 from http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/technology-in-education/

Photos:
Jordan, Brandi (2013 June 29) 11 Ways to Use Technology in the Classroom  [Graphic] Retrieved from http://blog.reallygoodstuff.com/11-ways-to-use-technology-in-the-classroom-infographic/

Johnson, Hans (n.d.) Technology is Awesome [graphic comic] Retrieved from http://iwastesomuchtime.com/on/?i=5131

Educational Game Reflection

For our online educational game, the most helpful technology would of course be our presentation tool. Our group used wix.com to create a website that definitely helped present our game more efficiently. We structured our website and organized our information the way we thought best provided by easy access of wix.com.

Another use of technology that we utilized was wiggio. Although we found wiggio useful at times, we still referred to our emails. If a group member were to start a conversation on wiggio, our smartphones would get a notification on our email accounts. So I think that wiggio is only useful for online group meetings, but in this case for our educational game, our group preferred to meet in person to better discuss the different aspects of the game that we wanted to acknowledge in our presentation. In a sense, we weren't utilizing wiggio to its full potential.

Although pizza isn't a source of technology, it served as a bonus for our audience. As aspiring teachers, we understand that some students need more motivation to get their attention. Because we don't want to bribe our students, reward systems can only be utilized to an extent. But in my experience, reward systems acknowledges students and make them feel like their hard work and dedication is appreciated and will motivate them to do better. Of course, we can't always use food to get students to excel in class. But I believe it can definitely bring more interested students to class. It doesn't always have to be food as well. It can be a point system that can lead to a better prize.

Overall, I think the website proved to be most useful for our group in my opinion. Wiggio wasn't useful for this group project because group members mainly referred to our emails. Pizza was just a motivator for our audience. but didn't enhance the academics of our game.


Online Sources:

 http://www.wix.com/
http://www.abcya.com/fraction_fling.htm