HaLlOwEeN!!!

Today we began meeting with our Assistive Technology groups. We went over our Zoho collaboration on Speech Recognition Software for about 30 minutes. We decided who was going to say what and tried to figure out our presentation as to make it creative and interactive. We then started talking about Inspiration, which is a good way to brainstorm, outline, and build diagrams. We will be using this program for our individual presentation summaries. It was pretty cool with all of the different shapes and ways to present the information. I think this would be a great way to teach outlining to students when they are learning how to write. Brainstorming and outlining are effective methods to get students to create and organize their thoughts and ideas and this program would be an interactive way to do so. Rapid fire is a great way to brainstorm within this program because everytime you hit return/enter it creates a new bubble. It can also be put into an outline form which is really neat! The activity in Inspiration gave us a feel for the program. Saving can be done in three ways, and it should be done in a viewable format (isf). It can then be exported as an image (jpeg) to be transferred to our website! We then talked about technology in Social Studies, where the three most common uses are digital primary sources, virtual field trips, and GIS (Geographic Information Systems). All of these three uses would be effective in the Social Studies classroom and can be fun for them as well. They allow for the kids to put things together on their own and to address their misconceptions which creates an opportunity for greater learning. I'm excited about our Assistive Technology Presentation and hope it goes well! See y'all next week!!! :)