Tonight Trisha and I completed our programing for our fictional class of students in Human Biology 11. And all I can say is Holy Cow. My eyes are exhausted and my brain is fuzzy. I totally understand why some teachers are so resistant to UDL. It was so much work doing one tiny worksheet on the bones of the human skeleton that I can't imagine doing it every day...and yet, I would if I was in a classroom every day because that is where we are going to!
Barb was talking tonight about presenting to the BEd students at MSVU the other day and how surprised they were about the ways that Apple Tech can be used in the classroom. I wish I could say I was surprised but the entire program needs to be overhauled. When I took it a looooooong time ago, I can honestly say that there were very few courses that I have used in my own practice and those ones were all taught by teachers who were still in the classroom.
But back to tonight. It was a heck of a lot of work but once something like that is done, it's done forever so nothing says I can't use it again!
Anyone who is thinking of being a teacher in the 21st century, watch this
After a few glitches with the java script, I was ready to roll! As a PST, it's my job to be a bridge between the teachers and students who need support in the class and that includes everyone. I've had a couple of students in my classroom who were Autistic and some of these apps would have made life so much easier for those students, especially the sensory regulation ones. I think that a lot of teachers have no idea about what students on the spectrum are dealing with or even those kids wit anxiety about school. I have one student currently who is so anxious that it takes her about an hour to calm down in my office. Yesterday, I gave her my IPod to play with pocket pond and she left smiling and happy. I let her keep it for the rest of the day and rather than have to leave the class every 15 minutes to come see me, she just brought up the pond and she stayed in class for the whole day. It really made a difference to her and she told me today that her Mother might buy her an IPod for Christmas.
Sometimes, tech can be a real blessing. Today was one of those days.
Whenever I see this app being used by a student who is non verbal or has communication issues, it just reinforces the fact of how important this kind of program is. There are more and more students in our school system who are going to need this to be successful. As Ruby's mother said, "this gives her a voice". Her PSA noted how her behavior had improved by 95% and how the program has allowed her to "unlock her communication".
Ruby is the kind of student that if we meant her before we saw her using Prolo, the majority of us would probably have assumed that she was not mentally handicapped in some way. As we talked about in our presuming competence discussions, we always go to the negative when presuming instead of the other way around. It's a good thing that this app is there to prove us wrong.
Tonight, I met Sam, Julie, Christian, Joe and Katie. These students are all non verbal and need to use the ProLoQuo2Go app in order to communicate at home, school and in the community. They were all fairly similar and yet had different interests and ideas. The thing about these students is that they were all made up. They don't exist. We got their info and then last week we programmed for them. It was so great to see how everyone did it and what they thought was best for the students. Some really cool ideas came out of this and it was very instructional.
We also had a chance to use another book creator app whihc was great fun. I can see it being used in all kinds of ways for all kinds of abilities and classes. For revisoin it would be really cool or for junior high social studies. Even language classes could us this as way of helping students into the task of using the correct tense when they are learning how to speak or to make up stories for others and share them. It's all really cool.
I just wish that the technology was being taught to BEd students in their degree. It would make the transition that much easier to usng it as a teaching tool but the majority of professors just don't get the use of tech in their own lives that they are just teaching the same old same old. It's incredibly frustrating to see all these incredible young, energetic educators who understand the power and use of technology but not being able to use it in the classroom. We really need a shake up of the education system! To the barricades!!!
Last week, we got the chance to be more hands on with the AT and actually design an entire program for a non verbal student that we were given. We named him Sam. After 2.5 hours of programming, my eyes were burning and my brain was buzzing. It was an excellent experience but the main thing that I got out of it was how hard it was. Even with all the tech available to us, it still needed two human beings to do the actual hand work. It was somewhat comforting to know that the computers haven't taken over everything yet.
It was good to work with a partner on this as well. Trisha had actually written down a lot of the cells and folders that we ended up using so that made it a quicker process than it might have been. Working together meant that we could see different areas that we may have missed or been weaker on. It was really hard work that brought home exactly how much communication we use in a day. I can't imagine how hard it must be to have limited communication in a world that is so verbal. These apps are goin to help more students become more integrated into the mainstream and by doing so, teach the rest of us some very important lessons.
After the heavy technology applications of the last two week, I must say it was actually refreshing to have a piece of paper in my hands last night at the beginning of the class! The whole idea of presuming competence had me a little thrown. As a literacy teacher, I was taught that we should presume that the students are a blank slate so we can teach them the strategies they need to succeed. I suppose it isn't too much of a stretch to think they may already have coping strategies that are in place and have been working just fine for them! It reminds me of myself in Math classes struggling to follow the way the Math teacher was doing the equations but I could do it myself in the way that I had made up. I still showed all my work (God how I hate that phrase! It sends shivers down my spine) but the teacher kept giving me a 0 because it wasn't that way SHE wanted me to get the answers! Needless to say, Parent Teacher Interviews were a lot of fun that term! The moral of course is never to assume as it makes an "ass" of "u" and "me" when it comes to thinking about what our students know and don't know.
Another topic last night that I found really interesting was the idea of convergent and disruptive technologies. As I have said before, the whole idea that one uber company seems to be in control of all this wonderful tech and that they are really cornering the market on education is something that I am having a real ethical problem with. It wouldn't matter to me if there were lots of companies and you could interchange the apps but some apps don't work on Samsung and vice versa. Soon we are going to be calling our schools after tech companies rather than places. Steve Jobs Middle School anyone? It is a good thing that students with needs can have all the tech in one place. It makes a great cost efficient argument for the DOE as well! But sometimes it feels like we are running before we can walk. The classroom teachers are not trained in this tech, they aren't all that comfortable with it in the room yet and I really can't blame them. It's a part of the job that they haven't been properly trained for and they are scared. And as Yoda said, "Fear leads to anger, Anger leads to hate, Hate leads to Suffering". That's the way a lot of teachers are feeling about all the new disruptive and convergent technology.
Proloquo 2 go was great fun and I can see how beneficial it could be to those students who are trapped in a body that doesn't do what they want it to. Carly Fleischmann is an inspiration and makes me wonder how well I could cope if I was in her position. It must be so incredibly hard not to be able to communicate with the world. It's bad enough when you are in a country where you don't know the language, imagine living in a world where you don't know the langauge.
Last year when I was teaching Sociology, we did some work on communication and how language is developed and what it means to be human. My students came to the conclusion that you can be human and not communicate with language but that without it, you are missing the major part of being human. With all the new augmentative communication technology, maybe no one will have to miss any part of being human.
Ernie and Bert show off the importance of communication
How important is non verbal communication? Watch this and decide for yourself!
I know that this is being written before the class on Wednesday but I wanted to write something else after the weekend that I had. I went shopping in Bangor with my sister, sister in law, Mom and Mom's best friend. Think of us as the Economic Stimulus Package. Anywho, every night we'd sit down with our receipts and tally up what we owed and how much we spent. On Sunday, I noticed my sister was using a highlighter to help her find the totals like we all did but she was using other colors in other places on the receipts. Always being the teacher, I asked her about why she was doing that.
She reminded me that because of her dyslexia, she needed colors sometimes to help her organize her ideas and thoughts. She was using different colors to help her figure out who she had bought for and how much she was spending. She also told me that reading the numbers was hard for her and by highlighting them in blue it helped her to remember the order of the numbers so she didn't make a mistake. It wasn't until I was half asleep that night that I realized that she was using a very low tech version of assistive tech to help her with her LD.
I am very proud of my sister. When we went to school, there was no dyslexia, you were just stupid. Dee had trouble learning how to read whereas I was reading before I went to school. I used to read her homework assignments and then tell her the answers so she wouldn't get in trouble.She had no real idea why she couldn't read or retain information but when she 19 and out of regular school she took a test in a magazine and it told her she was dyslexic. From that point on she became a woman possessed. She went to the library (this was way before computers) and did exercises that strengthened her reading and writing and found out what the positives of her LD were and how she could make this work for her. She even taught herself to write with her right hand by copying fairy tales into a notebook because it helped her right and left brain to communicate. Today, she works at the Halifax Infirmary as a Pharmacy Tech: the first in her class to be certified and the first at the hospital to be checked out on filling the trays for people on her own. As she told me on Sunday, "I see in pictures and make connections visually. I can also remember long numbers and series of things that makes me a whiz filling the trays."
