#7 Adaptive Technology and Website

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that accommodations to individuals with disabilities. One way that this translates into schools is with adaptive technology. These students may not be able to use technology traditionally, due to either physical or mental disability, but they are able to use it with the help of certain input and output devices. Devices for students with a physical disability might include a brail printer, voice recognition software for a student who cannot type, or alternative keyboards and/or switchboards who might not be able to use a normal mouse and keyboard.  A student with a learning disability might use a content mapping software, such as Inspiration, to link together ideas or a spell check software to help with word processing. These devices can help support both the use of the computer or learning while using technology. This technology was used in one of my classrooms in high school when a student with dyslexia had text from websites read aloud by the computer. Adaptive technologies would be very useful in the classroom to help students with disabilities, but these devices are often very pricey and would require training from the teacher.

I think that building the class website was something very beneficial for me as a future educator. Class websites are very common and building a website is a task that I will most likely have to do when I start teaching, so it was nice to have experience with this. I thought that the program we used was very intuitive and it made it very easy to place items on the page, and the type of item you were wanting. It felt like using virtual blocks to build the page. The only thing that I did not like was I found it kind of difficult to edit specific fonts. From working on this webpage project, I learned how to embed code into a website, putting in my google calendar. I also learned how to navigate a web creation software. Next time working on this assignment, I would like to take more time getting higher quality photographs to improve the website's aesthetics.
http://mskayladallen.weebly.com/

From DIIGO, I learned how to organize pages beyond simple book marking. The website allowed for coherent organization and the referencing of specific material within a website. I learned how to select specific material within a page that would be most helpful for future projects and the importance of having quality material. DIIGO could be used in my personal professional endeavors by letting me save specific ideas for lesson plans or relevant material for class. This would also be useful for team members, because the information in a group would be easy to share as well as highlight and sticky note specific content within a website and tell the group why this material is important. This could also be used in a classroom assignment for students to examine articles or other websites and be able to share these with the class. Other students would easily be able to access this material as well as make comments on it.