Second Class

There are many ways that mobile devices can be used in the classroom to help students with a range of learning disabilities take part in the learning process. During our second class, we learned that some mobile devices have built in controls allowing students with disabilities to use these devices to gather information. IPads, iPods, and iPhones can be used by students who experience vision, hearing, learning, and physical and motor challenges. I learned many new ways of using iPads to help students take part in learning activities and classroom participation. I found the discussion around this topic in class was particularly interesting because iPads are becoming increasingly popular in schools and having knowledge on how to effectively use them as a teaching and learning tool will be a great asset. By using mobile devices such as iPods in my classroom lessons, I now have a quick method to helping students’ that have reading challenges access information from the internet for projects and assignments. From our second class, I have learned that by enabling the speak selection in mobile devices, students have access to a portable tool that can help them understand text and ultimately gain self-confidence as students and learners. I work with several students who have used programs such as Kurzweil in order to have the ability to read through longer amounts of text. I look forward to introducing this tool to those students, so that they can now spend more time learning without having to use a computer program that is only available to them on select desktop computers throughout their school.

Another advantage of using tools such as the iPads in the classroom is the guided access selection that keeps the iPad locked in a single app. Enabling the guided access selection on iPads before given them to my students will reassure me that they are only viewing the material that they are intended to view. This will allow me to spend more time helping students in the classroom and less time monitoring student viewing content. Of course, there are other selections found in the accessibility section of the iPad that are useful when working with students with disabilities that I learned during our second class. The assistive touch selection and the new gesture selection allows individuals that may have difficulty touching the screen gain greater control over using the iPad. 

We also looked deeper into presumed competency by taking part in an activity where we selected a video and discussed it on our course blog. For this activity, I selected the YouTube video, “In My Language,” that shares the thoughts of Amanda Baggs. In the video, Amanda shares with the viewer how she interacts with the world around her. She does this my communicating to the viewer using a text to speech program on a computer. Amanda explains that she is very much interested in the world around her and may interact with her surroundings differently than others. This does not mean that she is not learning and taking in information. By providing Amanda with assistive technology, such as the computer she was using in the video to tell her story, she can effectively communicate her ideas to others. It is my job as a teacher to provide my students with the tools they need to take part in the learning process, and in other cases, to allow them to effectively communicate their learning with me and other members of the class. From watching Amanda’s video, I gained a greater appreciation of how others learn and take part in the learning process and understand that we all learn in different ways. It is up to me as a teacher to provide my students with learning opportunities and the tools needed to express those learnings. Failing to provide my students with those opportunities, would only reinforce the idea of presumed incompetency. This would be a failure on my part as an educator.