#7

As I mentioned in one of my previous blog posts, I have been using Twitter since high school, only not for academic/professional reasons. Engaging and interacting with professionals to learn about educational technology has expanded my interest in the area immensely. I find myself delving in to the "Recommended Tweets for You" notifications Twitter sends to my phone and reading about teachers and innovative classroom technology on my own. Just last week, I zoned out in another class (not the best, I know - sorry to my professor) and found myself reading about what Kentucky's Teacher of the Year did on her sabbatical (she traveled America and studied how diversity was taught in all types of school settings). This is extremely beneficial to me, as it inspires my future teaching career goals every day I use my educational twitter. I have yet to experience any issues in using the website.

The website design assignment was something, if I am being honest, I was completely dreading completing. I thought that it would be extremely complicated and time consuming to organize a functional website, however, about half way in to the assignment, I started to enjoy curating a fictional high school English teacher's class website. Learning how to embed a calendar on to a website was a new skill I acquired, and will be beneficial when I make a real class website in my future career as a teacher. The guidelines of the assignment did not mention anything about a "Parents" page, yet I felt it critical to include outside resources for parents, as learning should take place all the time, not only in school. This adding of the parents' resources was beneficial to my teaching philosophy, in which I realize that parents and guardians also play an important and impactful role in a child's success academically. The few struggles I had with Weebly.com were not being able to move text boxes or align  pictures/graphics freely. It seemed as though certain text boxes or embedded links could only fit in one area of certain pages. It did not majorly affect my design, and the website is still aesthetically pleasing!

A snippet of my homepage is below and the link to website here.

Assistive and adaptive technology benefits everyone in their daily lives, "returning independence through tecnhology" (as quoted in this RLSteeper youtube video). In classroom settings, A.T. is used to help students with disabilities have equal educational opportunities as students without disabilities. For example, computer software can create digital formats of course materials to be used with a screen reader. The text presented may be enlarged, converted and printed out in braille, read aloud with voice assistance, and various assisted listening devices to assist students who struggle with traditional methods of reading. I have observed first graders used assistive-text technology, in which the computer highlights each word, and students "talk back"to the computer, as voice assistance is used to help the students read stories, however, these were not students with disabilities, but they were using A.T. that also helps students with reading disabilities. 

A challenge I perceive in using adaptive technologies in the classroom is the computer literacy my students will have various skill levels in, thus affecting actual productivity of the technology. More advanced technology needed for students with a multitude of needs may propose issues in operating and interacting with the technology at hand. However, as the teacher, I plan to work with my students in mastering any complications with such technology, as it is meant to aid, not hurt, them in their academic endeavors.