Access to Literacy Class

Day 4 The first task of the day was to watch the video A Pivotal Role in the Household video. The woman in the video had an ALS diagnosis but she didn’t let that stop her. In the video she shows how, with a single switch and AssistiveWare's Proloquo, KeyStrokes and SwitchXS software, she continues to perform a pivotal role in the household by doing the shopping, managing the bank accounts and even designing her own web site. She has no control of hands and the device is taped on her face. It is activated by cheek twitches. In Marie’s own words, “Without the computer I’d be like a vegetable”.   The video shows how a person’s life can be changed completely when AT is used to function and communicate. The next task was for everyone to say one way students can demonstrate their knowledge in one word using Poll everywhere. It was a great reminder of how fabulous Poll Everywhere is for getting a quick pulse of everyone’s learning in a quick amount of time. I would use this ...

Day 3 So unfortunately I was not able to attend class on this day but was excited to see how Blackboard Classroom worked. I went to open the Blackboard classroom a couple of days later and regrettably found out there was no sound. L I still tried to follow the recording as best I could even though there were large moments of nothing happening on the screen with no sound. I decided in the end to try my best to follow the syllabus listing for the day and complete searches for the various apps that were listed. The Literacy Task Analysis of the reading process was the first task of the day. We had been asked the day before to list the steps involved in a section of print of Bram Stroker’s Dracula. I was easily able to recognize the obvious steps such as recall of word pattern, orthographic processing, phonological processing, visualizing personal image related to the word, visual identification of first letter, and knowing we read from left to right and from the top of the page t...

Class 2 “Never stress over something that you'll forget about next week. And if it's not something you'll forget, then you can't change it anyway” (p. 3, poemofquotes.com). Stress, stress, stress is all I felt the night before and the morning before class started. I was anxious and worried because it seemed like every time I tried to upload something I had created on one of the apps, it wouldn’t work. I was extremely frustrated and stressed to the hilt. Watching and talking to a lot of the people in class before class started, I realized mostly everyone felt the same way. This made me feel a little better and a little less alone. Usually when I am feeling this stressed out, I don’t say anything to the instructor. I just continue to feel stressed until the assignment eventually gets finished. Today, I thought to myself, if I was the instructor, I would want to know how my students were feeling. So I explained to Barbara that I was feeling stressed out about the ...

Class One: AT- Access to Literacy April 22, 2017 We began the day with class introductions using three new apps: Chomp, Videoscribe, and Telligami. It was an extremely fun way to get to know each other and learn apps that could be utilized in our classrooms as well. I could see using these apps in the classroom for many purposes, class introductions, character sketches from novels, and biographies on historical people to name a few. Next we watched the Ted Video, The Myth of Average, and while I had seen this video previously, it always gives me insights into my own teaching. The biggest takeaway from this video was the quote, "You design classrooms for nobody, when you design on average". It reminds me of how important it is to take all students' learning styles and capabilities into play when designing lessons. Whether it comes to teaching style, materials used, or how students show knowledge. The video also reminds me of an old poem I heard when I was younger call...