This past Thursday, I had the opportunity to attend the Michigan Council for Exceptional Children's (CEC) annual awards event--my invitation came due to my affiliation with one of the award recipients. Terry Bennett, the owner of Specialty Pet Supply (a small store located in Plymouth, Michigan), currently employs my oldest brother at the store.My brother is 27 years old and is autistic, and has been working with Terry since he was hired at her store in 2009--with assistance from his job coach, my brother is able to complete a variety of tasks, including (but not limited to) stocking shelves, filling "food containers", and pricing items. He loves his current job, and leaves home with a positive attitude each and every day that he is scheduled to work.
Terry was nominated (due to her work with my brother) to receive this year's "Outstanding Business Award", given to the business that serves as a prime example of a local entity that is helping to transition individuals with disabilities into their respective communities. Terry is unbelievably accommodating, accepting, and understanding, and does a superb job of tailoring my brother's assigned tasks to his strengths and abilities. She was nominated by my parents, and was more than privileged to receive the honor.
The event was wonderful, full of reminders of why I aspire to work with individuals with disabilities--amazing accounts from students, teachers, and administrators were heard all throughout the night. To see my brother's face light up when he heard his name mentioned in Terry's acceptance speech was something that I will never forget, and the night is something that I will always remember.
My brother and Terry after the event! It was an awesome night!
In my current field placement, a first through third grade integrated Montessori classroom, literacy is a definite focal point--the students produce written work in their journals for close to an hour each day ("Independent Writing"), and, although some students thrive when composing "traditional" written work, many students truly struggle when attempting to strategically represent their thoughts and ideas in their compositions. I have had the opportunity to work individually with several of the lower achieving writers in the class, and (as I have mentioned in previous posts), many of these students have exceptional ideas; they are simply unable to transfer their "mental" stories onto paper. Therefore, I have selected a specific second grade Grade Level Content Expectation (GLCE) that places extreme emphasis on the actual content found in a student's literary work, and not on the form or production of the composition. My designed lesson will focus on second grade "English/Language Arts" expectation W.PS.02.01, which states, "[Students will] develop personal style in oral, written, and visual messages in both narrative (e.g., descriptive language, use of imagination, varying sentence beginnings) and informational writing (e.g., facts, effective conclusions"). In order for the students to best be able to meet the criteria mentioned within this GLCE, they will have the opportunity to utilize Dragon Naturally Reading 10.1, a free, downloadable speech-to-text tool that will allow the students to verbally narrate their constructed story, thus proving them with a medium through which their literary ingenuity, creativity, and uniqueness can shine through.
The "Big Idea" content goals for this lesson will include the following:
- All writing should have a distinct and clear purpose, and should be written with a specific audience in mind (i.e., instructor, peers, family, etc.)
- The development of a literary"style" depends upon the author's ability to engage their audience within a detailed and thoughtful narrative
- Although the mechanics of one's writing (i.e., grammar, punctuation, capitalization, correct syntax, etc.) are extremely important components, a writer's ability to both produce and represent his/her thoughts through written composition is equally as important.
Lesson Objectives:
* Using Dragon Naturally Speaking 10.1, the students will work individually (with explicit instructor scaffolding) to create a one-page piece of fictional literature
* The students will be required (and encouraged) to create personally unique and creative compositions--as previously mentioned, through the integration of the "Dragon" speech-to-text technology, the students will be able to fully focus their attention on the content of their work, and not on its mechanical/grammatical form.
Based upon my observations of my CT's students, I believe that a definite misconception that they collectively possess in regards to the act of writing is that this area of literacy cannot be "writer centered"--all of the students seem to believe that their pieces of writing were constructed strictly for their instructor to critique, evaluate, and return to them. Many of them are seemingly under the impression that the act of writing is purely academic in nature, and that it cannot be an individualized or enjoyable process. I believe that, through the implementation of my selected technology into this designed lesson, the students will be able to truly write for themselves, thus allowing their individual "voice" and literary style to present itself.
So, apparently another downside of this technology is that it's fairly difficult to embed videos using "Slide"--the tech. provides you with a variety of sites into which you can embed your story (blogger, facebook, twitter, and Pecasa, among others), but, as I experienced when attempting to embed my project into this post, the embedding process was more difficulty than it is perceived to be.
In each of the four senior level TE 402 sections (science, social studies, mathematics, and literacy), we have discussed that, even before beginning to focus on the target content, the development of a trusting, supportive, and collaborative classroom community is absolutely essential. While sifting through the various technologies located on Levine's blog, I came across "Slide", an amazingly easy technology that allows users to manipulate images within a "slide show"-esqe digital story. I explored both the "Slide" main page and Levine's sample projects, and viewed "Two Strangers", a story created by a "Slide" user-- I thought to myself, "What an awesome tools for students to use to put their unique personalities on display in the classroom". Through the use of these types of technologies (and the creation of digital stories such as the one embedded above), a truly connected and personalized community could begin to come to fruition; meaningful, unique images expose the identities of people more than words in isolation possibly could; by allowing students to both create and narrate (either digitally or in the classroom) their own "stories" as a beginning of the year project, substantial relationships between individual students could begin to form.
In retrospect, my experience utilizing Slide was positive--I loved the ease at which I was able to navigate through the site, as well as the easily identifiable and applicable "special effects" that were avaliable (cropping, shifting, and reordering the selected images, editing the time at which the images were displayed, lighting/coloring of images, etc.). Regardless of the age of one's students, with appropriate scaffolding from the instructor, this specific site would be an exemplary tool for students to put to use (either inside or outside of the classroom) when creating personalized digital stories. However, I was unable to implement audio into my story, which, depending on the goals, objectives, or intentions of one's lesson, could be considered a tremendous downfall--in my opinion, personally mixed audio assists in bringing these types of stories to life, and serves as additional motivation in completing the assignment (for an exemplary "digital story" site, check out Photo Story 3--this tool is easy to both download and install, and has very unique audio features that I introduced to third grade students; they loved it!). However, when taking this technology's overall potential into consideration, I believe that Slide would be an extremely effective tool to implement into one's classroom. The utilization of the technology (i.e., instructing the students in regards to how Slide can/should be used) would not take away from/damper the designed lesson goals and/or "big ideas", which, I believe, is something that all instructors must deeply consider when attempting to integrate the use of technology into their instruction.
Over the course of this school year, I have had the opportunity to journal with a first grade student who struggles greatly with the physical act of writing. I journal with this particular student at least three time each week (on average), and, on most occasions, he displays rather strong phonemic, phonological, and sound/letter awareness skills, but is consistently unable to connect his strings of "pseudo-words" into coherent thoughts. In addition, this student's handwriting is very much illegible, and, therefore, it is difficult for either my CT or me to interpret this student's journal entries. For this student, even with consistent scaffolding from his instructors, writing is a definite (and constant) challenge.
With this being said, based upon my experiences with this student, I can tell you first hand that, in comparison to other children his age, this student's ability to conjure up ideas and verbally articulate them in the form of a story is second to none. From a super-hero washing machine who miraculously learns to fly in an attempt to save an entire village from a fire, to a clan of penguins who learned to play hockey through their discovery of eggs, this student has an amazingly brilliant imagination that is always evolving. However, his current inability to legibly document these wonderful ideas truly hiders his success as a student-author--my CT frequently urges him to "push for more writing", but, as I often tell her, this student's ideas are there, we are just unable to see them because he cannot write them down. Over the course of this week, with this student's dilemma in mind, I searched for an assistive technology that would assist students who possess imaginations that are a bit too advanced for their physical, "traditional" writing abilities.
I came across Dragon Natural Speaking 11, an amazingly applicable speech-to-text technology that can be easily applied in the classroom. After reading the wikipedia excerpt regarding the TPCK model, I realized that, in order to effectively implement this specific technology within each of our respective classrooms, as instructors, we must possess strong "Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge" (TPCK). TPCK can be defined as the knowledge pertaining to how technologies can be integrated into the learning environment in meaningful ways; eventually, this TPCK, and the strategic implementation of technology, serves to directly enhance the target curriculum. For example, upon choosing to allow my students to utilize "Dragon" in the literacy classroom, I would remain cognizant of the specific stage of the writing process at which they currently reside (i.e., Which curricular standards, benchmarks, skills, and expectations have my students already mastered?--Are they informally drafting? Are they simply generating ideas, or are they beginning to formulate a final draft?). In this respect, my students' always-changing curricular focus would have an enormous impact on the ways in which I would utilize the technology during my future instruction. Essentially, depending upon which "writing stage" the students were working to develop and become comfortable with, I would implement "Dragon" much differently (i.e., the level of precision that the students would be expected to work at would be altered; low precision when generating ideas, high precision when composing a final draft, etc.). Upon initially beginning to use the technology, the students' individual use of "Dragon" would, obviously, need to be highly scaffolded and closely monitored, but, as the students' collective comfort level would begin to strengthen, this speech-to-text tool would be an extremely effective technology to implement when using an interactive writing pedagogical technique in your classroom.
In regards to the student who I described earlier in this post, I believe that a speech-to-text technology such as "Dragon" would be a highly effective tool for him to utilize for one, specific reason--the focus of his writing would now be placed upon his generation and documentation of meaningful content, and not on the (often frustrating) process of attempting to linearly hand-write his ideas on a piece of paper. Through the use of "Dragon", this student's confidence and motivation in the literacy classroom would likely sky rocket. More importantly, this student's use of this tool would, hopefully, alter his overall perception of the true purpose of writing--to express one's ideas in a creative, unique, and personalized manner.
I've been blogging for over a year now, but, as I have mentioned in a few of my previous posts, this is my first time fully engaging in the world of Twitter. Obviously, as with the various blogging sites that are now openly avaliable for use, if used appropriately, Twitter has great potential for increasing the ability of students to actively and precisely communicate/collaborate in the classroom. For students who have difficulty sharing their ideas during school hours (and/or lack the confidence to do so), social media sites can, potentially, provide an amazing communicative alternative for these students to have their voices heard. Especially with blogging, where there is no real restriction in regards to the breadth of the authors' thoughts, some of our more passive students may really excel when provided the opportunity to share their opinions on a safe and secure online platform.
With all of this being said, one potential drawback is the vastness of the "Tweeting" community--even for a 22 year old college student, Twitter is extremely overwhelming, and it's difficult (even with apps. such as Tweetdeck) to stay organized and connected to your followers and those who you follow. On one hand, as instructors, we have the option of censoring/monitoring our students' access to the outside Twitter community (through private accounts and services such as True Twit) in an attempt to ensure that they are not becoming overwhelmed or accessing inappropriate or unethical content. But, if we are constantly restricting/monitoring our students' use of technology, what are they truly getting out of the experience? These web 2.0 technologies are meant to be explored--if students aren't granted autonomy (or are restricted in their use), they may view the use of the tech. as being either useless or ineffective. How do we solve this problem? Will we ever be able to allow our students to truly experience all that Twitter (and other social media tools) has to offer?
Over the weekend, based upon the amount of work that I was forced to put into our digital images lab, I would guess that I struggled much more than the majority of the people in our section. I began experimenting with Photoshop, and, because I liked its format and its easy navigability, I began completing my lab on this site. However, when it came time to embed my slide show into my blog, I was completely unable to do so. At most, Photoshop provided me with a link to the slide show that was undersized and distorted two of my four altered images. Based on what I can tell, I wasn't able to embed my product to my blog (obviously, a Blogger site) because the "video" presentation was not a Google or Youtube product. After deciding that this site had frustrated me for far too long, I decided to flip through the wiki and view other people's work (especially those who also use Blogger as their class blog site). I found that the majority of Blogger users used Picasa, a digital image tool that was created by those at Google. After toying around with the site's features, I found that Picasa was just as easy to manipulate as Photoshop--more importantly, I found that, once I had reworked/reformatted my slide show through this Google-run site, I was finally able to embed it into my blog. This specific lab has taught me an extremely valuable lesson--before beginning any labs, do some research regarding which sites the various technologies are compatible with (i.e., Picasa is a Google site, so it is compatible/can be embedded into Blogger, which is also a Google site). Your life will become much easier and far less stressful!
click here to view my digital story