Blog Post # 15

Samantha West

I am blessed to have all of my senses that I was suppose to have. As a student I know that a class can be difficult enough even for me. I do not know where I would be if I could not see or hear. I know that it is not only hard on the student, but it is hard on the teacher as well. It is a good thing we have more and more technology to help out these students and teachers understand and perform better. Braille books are very helpful for blind students. If you can read Braille. Also, most schools are going all digital. What do those students do then? How about if each student has an Ipad, a student who is legally blind might have one that will read the book to them. If we were listening to a book in class on day, a student who had hearing impairments could follow along on his Ipad. There are many ways our students can learn, and most of them have the drive to.

On a website I found, they spoke about a student Karen, she was legally blind and they went through her day. She would sit in history class, and listen to the teacher speak about the American Civil War, as she took notes on her personal digital assistant (PDA). She then went to her English class where they were talking about the story To Kill a Mockingbird. Karen had downloaded a electrical copy on her PDA. That way she could read it with her braille. She also switched back and forth between the story, and taking notes. Later she went to the library with her partner for a project, and used the computer there. In the library there is a computer that whatever page she is on it will read it out to her. This makes things simpler for the librarian. She can stay busy doing her work while Karen gets done what ever she needs. Karen is a star student, and is at the top of her class. Karen was taught at a young age to use her resources wisely. There will come a time as a teacher that I might have to teach someone with a disability, and I will be ready for whatever it throws my way because you just have to remember the student is just as excited about learning as you should be to teach them. I got this information from www.afg.com.

Morgan Rushlow- iPad usage for special needs students. videos I watched-iPad usage for the blind teaching deaf/blind how to use iPad
I viewed the videos about iPad usage and how it can help students with disabilities learn because it has features that help the deaf and blind to navigate the apps and do the tasks they intend to do. It has not only a speaking feature for the blind but a voice-command for the deaf and blind so they know exactly what they are doing and going to- however, i find that while the iPad is great because of these features it is best if someone is there helping the person navigate the iPad, because they may navigate to the wrong app or type the wrong thing. The features the iPad has will be good for use in teaching students with disabilities of any kind as well as those who are not disabled in any way. the iPad is a device that is versatile and can perform so many functions, although it is important to know how to use it best and to make sure that the users of these devices get the help they need in using it. I found some information about iPads on the web and found some pretty interesting things- such as this website states-http://www.edweek.org/dd/articles/2011/10/19/01speced.h05.html, iPads are helping students all across the board in their learning because it is helping with not only hearing and sight impaired students, but it is helping those who are having a hard time with communication skills such as those with autism as well. iPads are indeed having a major impact on learning outcomes and they have a very important role in the future of education, as apple states in its’ very own statement about its’ own creation,the iPad-http://www.apple.com/education/ipad/. iPad makes it possible to do so many things now that were not possible even 10 years ago when iPad was not even a thought in Apple’s mind, that it is an understatement to say that it is going to be transformative, as this website states-http://www.concordmonitor.com/news/8040411-95/ipads-bring-students-with-disabilities-new-ways-to-participate-excel-in-education, iPad lets you express yourself in a variety of ways and this is why students can learn communication skills better with it because there are so many ways for students to participate in class and so many different apps that creatively express yourself it is mind-blowing. Clearly mind-blowing is an understatement in terms of what the iPad can do and will do for not only learning but for everything. iPad is a truly amazing piece of technology and it is worth it for schools to try to see how it improves student learning outcomes. iPad is truly revolutionary. Sure iPad has its issues and is best used with a helper if needed, its’ benefits outweigh the problems with it.As a collaborative secondary education major I plan to use iPad in my future classroom for these reasons-because it can do so much and can inspire creativity in ALL students. Daniel LoVette
The Mountbatten braillewriter is something that I would definitely use in my classroom if the student had practice using it. There will be a lot of note taking of many things in my classroom so through the braillewriters ability to give audio feedback, the blind student will be able to participate more often in my classroom debates, projects, and even lectures. Check out Mountbatten here. If I were going to be a math teacher, there is no doubt that I would use Art Karshmer’s invention. He discusses how teaching math to the blind is difficult because all braille is linear and a lot of math problems require numbers to be stacked atop one another. Thus, he created a 3D grid that uses blocks with braille numbers on them. This way the bling student is able to work math problems like the rest of the class. Teaching math to the blind!

Blog Post # 14

Why is Health Class so Important?
Why do you think health class is so important in school? Do you think it should be a mandatory class? Should it even be offered as a class? Tell me what you think. I know that everyone has their favorite subject. If Health class was cut from the schools would you be mad about it, or happy.

What does Health classes offer that is important to life?
Everything!
Watch these videos and write your blog post on your view of Health classes before and after watching these videos! You never know these videos might help you save someone's life someday!

Smartboard Project # 12 Part B-EDM 310 Braque Group. (M. Rushlow, D.LoVe...

C4T Post Teacher #4 Post # 2

In my last C4T, Brendan Jones blog title was, From Spoons to Ladles, and all in between. What an interesting topic. What he is talking about is he did not want to spoon feed his children, but he didn't want to just let them fall with no help at all. He started with notebooks and blogs. The blogs worked well, but he still had to stay on top of them for them to actually do them all. When doing the blogs They were helpful because the students could comment on each others blogs, but it is hard to comment on someone's blog who did not do theirs. Also, to do their blogs, the students must bring their laptops to class. Most students noticed that if they did, they would have to do work. So they chose not too bring theirs. Finding that Happy middle ground was pretty hard for Mr. Jones. The concept of the whole thing was to get the students to be pure inquiry, which was impossible for Junior high, but he did not want to spoon feed them either. The way they liked it. By the end of the year, they had met that happy little middle spot. Where they were actually thinking for themselves, but was not being left alone to fend for themselves. Mr. Jones is not only getting his students ready for the final exam, but for the life exam. This blog post showed me that It is not bad to try something different in your classroom sometimes. Just because other teachers are not doing it does not mean you can not either. Stand up and be that teacher that when the students move on to the next grade they will say thank you.

Blog Post #13

Nakenya Ntaiya: A Girl Who Demanded School By: Daniel LoVette - Braque Group

I am sure to not be speaking for myself when I say that this video has the potential to make every American citizen feel like the size of an ant. Hearing Nakenya Ntaiya’s story makes me feel very privileged to live in this country. Ms. Ntaiya is from the Masai tribe in Kenya, and if just being in the tribe isn’t hard enough, being a Masai female is unimaginable. Masai members are tall, jump high, wear red, and hunt lions. As impressive as this sounds, their customs of oppression towards the female race are a tragedy that is happening all over the continent of Africa at this moment. Males are raised to be warriors, and women are raised to be mothers. Girls are engaged by the age of five, and are expected to be a perfect woman by the age of twelve. They have no say in political issues, family issues, career choices, or are even able to own land. By the eighth grade the average Masai female endures a circumcision ceremony by which any outsider would consider mutilation. The practice is unsanitary, and is the cause of many annual deaths of young female tribe members.
Nakenya Ntaiya has experienced this life and has overcome adversity to chase after her dream of being an educator and an activist against said practices. After almost not making it through the circumcision ceremony alive, Nakenya had an ultimatum to either become a wife and mother or to start high school which was very uncommon. After finishing high school, she was accepted to a women’s college in Virginia and had to get the tribe’s approval and support to attend, which was not an easy task. After getting the approval of sixteen male tribe members, she hits American higher education by storm and ultimately earns a masters degree in education. Nakenya has since started a girls school in the village and is making a positive impact in many student lives.
The biggest obstacle an American student has to face to attend college is finances, and most find a solution. Not attending high school isn’t even an option, and even then we take it for granted. More students, including myself, have to realize that the education we receive is a privilege beyond measure. As a future educator, I hope to instil a sense of urgency to my students so that they might not slip through the cracks like so many do. This testimony is a great one, and it’s top ten TED position is well deserved!

Arvind Gupta: Turning trash into toys for learning by: Morgan Rushlow-Braque Group

video-turning anything into a tool for learning
Arvind Gupta is a toy-maker and he is from India. He has been in the business of toy-making for more than 30 years and is making a revolution in the educational toy industry.Gupta has gone to schools and presented his learning toys; and,needless to say, they liked them. He began his career as an engineering major in college in the 1970’s-he didn’t think about making toys in college but he went to schools and saw that children wanted to make and create things and was inspired to help them by seeing this- and he started making toys for them to use to learn. He shows us in this video that you can turn anything into a learning tool. Gupta in this ted talks video takes simple things that seldom would be thought of as having but one use and makes them into something else that can be used as a teaching tool. Gupta made geometric shapes with a flexible material. He also showed how to make the shapes of a ship, a bird and a hat and other things using newspaper. He created many things with simple everyday objects that I wouldn’t of thought of as having multiple uses. Gupta shows us that almost anything can be turned into something else-one thing can have many forms. Gupta makes the quote in this ted talks video that “The best thing a child can do with a toy is to break it.” Why would he say this?Because Gupta believes that you can use any resource you have to create what it is you need to use-that means when something is broken it is still useful because you can make something else. An item that is broken can be recycled and can still be put to good use- in this case,it is used for learning.. This would teach children to be resourceful and to use what they know to create what they need. These are very useful skills for students they will need. Why does Gupta’s toys teach these things? Because they are simple toys made out of simple things that are familiar to children and when demonstrated by a teacher the students will be able to think of all the uses of the items the teacher used. These toys Gupta created came from his idea that to teach we should love others, use what they know,and what they have, to build on. He believes that when given the chance to actually have the experience with a concept they get excited about learning because they are able to see why and how the concepts they are learning about works.

“To this day… for the bullied and beautiful” Shane Koyczan by:Samantha West-Braque group

“ We are not the only ones who live like this.” This one sentence he repeated, and it is stuck in my mind. It is something to think about. Let us go back. Go back to when you were in Upper Elementary or Middle School. Who was those kids that were picked-on, bullied, and disliked? Were they you? Was you the Bully? These are the questions that went through my mind when I was watching this video. It is sad to know that our children will have to go through this. When I was younger I was never the popular kid because my parents were not rich, and I was not the prettiest girl. I did not have many friends, and it really hurt my feelings when I could not figure out why. When I got into High School, I lost a lot of weight, and was actually liked. I became the person who I had hated the most, a bully. I was so mean to some people, and later I realized what I had done. I have now apologized to every single person I was ever mean to. I thought this topic was just right for me, because I will stand up to bullying from now on. Shane spoke about being being adopted, and feeling unloved. He said he went from being sad, depressed, to wanting to kill a kid. It should not be like this. Children should not have to feel like this. Bullying is a subject that we will have to deal with for the rest of our lives. For some people dealing with it is different from others, but we are in some way affected by this terrible act. We are all beautiful in our own little way!

http://www.ted.com/playlists/124/ken_robinson_10_talks_on_educ.html

November C4K Posts

Chloe is a third grade student in Mrs. Yollis's classroom. Her last blog post that I commented it was about the Ohji Village she visited the day before with her mom. I could tell Chloe was very interested in the Chamush huts that were built there. She compared the huts to the story the Three Little Pigs. At the end of her blog she asked if we have seen a Chamush hut before, where did you see it, and if we have any more facts. This is a great way to get more feedback on a topic you are interested in. Chloe's blog was very interesting, and I informed her on that.

Blog post 12

Samantha West, Morgan Rushlow, and Daniel LoVette

Sir Ken Robinson had many key points in his first video. He pointed out a very important key point to me, and that is ADHD. When my brother was little, he was sent to two specialists. One doctor diagnosed him with ADHD. The other said he was just a normal little boy, and he was. There was nothing wrong with him besides he didn’t want to sit in a classroom all day. They wanted to put him on medication that he did not even need. Doctors all over America are doing this now. It’s like we go straight to medication without even looking at what could be causing the problem. I find it interesting that my special education class was just speaking on this same topic Tuesday night. Do I believe our children should be drugged at such a young age? Of course I don’t. Do I think we should try every other thing in the book first? You better believe it! If nothing works should we resort to medication? That is the parent’s decision. Sir Ken Robinson and my point is how can we expect for every student to pay attention to, and I quote, “boring stuff”, when they could be watching TV, playing on their phones, ect. School is going to be boring at times, and teachers have to understand just because a child finds a subject boring does not mean they have an attention disorder.
Which leads me to another key point I would like to point out from the video. Sir Ken Robinson states, “ We shouldn’t be putting our kids asleep, we should be waking them up.” Hello! This is a wake up call to all of us soon to be teachers! He is speaking directly to us in this statement. My educational teacher always talks about how every teacher wants to teach to that perfect circle of students. Not the students that learn to fast, and not the students who learn to slow. Teachers want a class full of students that come in and understand everything on the day it is taught, and it can not be like that. We have to find a way to interest all the students, such as group learning. Group learning can keep all students busy and entertained. This keeps them from having time to act out. If you have not watch Changing Education Paradigms, Watch it. Sir Ken Robinson can teach everyone a thing or two about what should change in our educational programs.

How to Escape Education’s Death Valley

In this particular lecture, Sir Ken Robinson discusses the problems with No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and the supposedly Attention Deficiate Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) epidemic. In addition he summarizes what the role of the teacher should be in order to counteract these problems.
Being from Great Britain, Sir Robinson begins his lecture with a joke: “Before I moved to the United States, people told me that Americans didn’t get irony.” He then explains that Americans in fact do get irony and that it is visible through the education program NCLB. H says that NCLB should instead be called, “millions of children left behind.” The American classroom is changing for the worse because our dropout rate continues to rise and students are disengaged in the classroom. Sir Robinson attributes this to the natural personality of humans in that we are naturally diverse and that NCLB promotes conformity and the two cannot co-exist. I agree with this because NCLB implements standardized testing. Standardized testing should not be the main focus in education and Robinson states that they should instead be used to “support learning and diagnose.”
Sir Ken Robinson also believes that ADHD is not an epidemic. To him, children are not disengaged in the classroom because they are suffering from ADHD, they are “suffering from childhood.” This is a great point because children are not meant to sit and listen for hours at a time. They should be creating, and working through projects that are educationally fun. However, for this to happen, teachers have to change. Robinson says: “Teachers are the lifeblood of society.” Teaching should be a creative profession in which they mentor, stimulate, and engage students to promote life-long learners. instead of feeding facts to students, teachers should facilitate and let learning happen naturally.

The Importance of Creativity:
Ken Robinson in this video made a wonderful point about creativity- that we need creativity in order to discover ourselves and to figure out who we are as a person-our identity. Creativity is the key, as Ken states in this video, to being successful people but, however, as Ken states in this video creativity is not being encouraged in schools today and instead students are taking a path toward where the most money is made and what society believes is important to the economy. Ken believes students are not allowed to be creative in schools and schools kill creativity because society wants this cookie-cutter image of people and so instead of individualizing learning to each student as we should be doing, education has been designed to produce graduates in this cookie-cutter design in which all students are taught the same way-with what is believed to be the “most useful subjects” prioritized in school while creative subjects are not being prioritized. Ken believes in this video that education is teaching students to not be creative because of the idea that creativity isn’t needed in the workforce. Ken believes that students are taught today that it isn’t ok to be wrong and that it’s not ok to be their creative selves in which they have their individual talents and skills which are unique to each person. Ken believes that the education system today caters to industry demands but it should be catering to individual student needs and passions/desires. Ken believes allowing creativity is important to each students’ success and fulfillment in their lives. Ken believes that by not allowing creativity in school, many students are being left out in the system because some students’ talents are not being recognized because their talents do not lie within the frame of this cookie cutter image that is seen as desirable and important, but instead in the areas of study that are seen as less important and less desirable.

Project 14 Smartboard Presentation