Assistive Technology Case Study

The Assistive Technology Case Study was an assignment where I had to review special cases and come up with a solution.  There will be many times in my career where I will have a student with a disability that needs technology to understand the material.  This assignment allowed me to use my brain and come up with solutions that I may face as a teacher.  The scenes included a teacher and a specialist who were trying to create a learning unit for a class, but they had to adapt it to Samuel, a boy who had a learning disability.  The two professionals talked about many different ways to help Samuel adapt to the material.  I definitely learned a great deal from this assignment.  I was not sure what speech synthesis was until this lesson.  The two professionals decided to form a group and work with Samuel while they did their activity.  One of the questions that stuck out to me was “Do you think Samuel’s experience would have been as powerful if he would have worked in isolation with Maria? Why or why not?”  I feel very passionate about not excluded children with disabilities.  It’s imperative that I incorporate technology to help further assist a special child.  I really enjoyed learning about the way the two educators assisted Samuel. 

I also learned about how to create a unit on authors and books.  It’s very important that I have good collaboration skills with my co-workers.  This assignment was primarily based on teacher collaboration and it taught the importance of it.  I will take this into my many years of teaching with me. 

Here is a link to the case study:
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0BxsaBtml2NN1ZjM3OGQ0OGYtY2RlMi00OTU0LThiMTQtMjZkYTlhZDRjYThk&hl=en

NETS met: NET standard 1d was met because this assignment included the students getting together in a group with Samuel.  They were able to engage in a learning environment.  Samuel was learning from his peers and his peers were learning from him.  Also, the two professionals were able to customize and personalize a learning activity to address Samuel’s diverse learning style by incorporating speech synthesis.  This met NET standard 2c.