Jamael
For an assignment for my class on Education for Children with Special Needs, I will be creating a resource guide on information for parents and teachers on numerous disabilities. So far this class has been quite insightful, and I think this resource guide will be one of the most resourceful (couldn't help being redundant) and useful assignments I could ever get. I will be linking useful articles with general information, accommodations/adaptations, and tips for parents for EIGHT different disabilities. The point of the assignment was so that when I am a teacher, and a child has been diagnosed with a disability, I can direct them to my Resource Guide! page and they can find whatever they want to know about this new diagnosis for their child right there. Most people in my class are making binders, but I believe in saving the planet and making use of this website I have. By the way, thanks to all the strangers that check this thing. I was totally expecting like 20 visitors in the past 6 months when I checked the stats and I had over 2,000!!! I wondered if there was a glitch in their calculations, but if not, I would love to know you guys are out there!
Jamael
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This week we had talked about technology that we can use as visual aids in the classroom. I really liked Tagxedo, a tool that pulls commonly used words in a text and sizes them according to their frequency. What ends up happening is that the main ideas of the entire text are clearly laid out in a visually pleasing manner! I like to think of it as a "word-mapping" software. Here is an example I made from a webpage written by the University of California at Berkeley about Alfred Wegener, the father of plate tectonics. If you don't know the story of Alfred Wegener (VEG-en-er) this picture does a pretty good job. Wegener was a geophysicist in the late 1800s/early 1900s. He noticed that the continents looked like they fit together like a puzzle. He developed a hypothesis he called "continental drift," suggesting that the continents used to be one large continent (Pangaea) that broke apart into the land masses we have today. He collected all this data that supported his hypothesis, but all of it was quickly dismissed by the scientific community because he had no explanation of how this could possibly happen. He had "no driving force." About 60 years later, when technology had advanced enough for more sophisticated data collection, scientists started to put together the same exact hypothesis Wegener had made in 1915, only this time they were able to explain a driving force. It was soon widely accepted as the Theory of Plate Tectonics. In this picture above, the biggest words that pop out at me are Wegener, continents, plate, theory, ocean, crust, scientists, and evidence. I also see Pangaea, geologists, drift, geophysics, tectonics, time, and others. Not too shabby, Tagxedo!
We also played with Inspiration, a computer software that helps with brainstorming. I didn't care for this one too much because I was having a lot of problems with it being slow. When I got past that, I still had a hard time connecting with it. It is a paid software and it frankly, looked a bit tacky. I personally can't take sloppy notes (I'm a bit OCD that way), and chaotic brainstorming isn't my thing either. I'm embarrassed to post my creation from Inspiration, so if you will excuse my passivity. I did check out the free online version of this same sort of thing Bubbl.us and it was actually a lot better than its paid evil twin, Inspiration. Although, like I said, I can't brainstorm or think like this so I didn't really make anything that is worthy of posting to the world wide web. Bubbl did seem to have better graphics, and in my opinion, it was easier to navigate. This concept of visual learning seems really affective and as a visual/kinesthetic learner myself, I have to say, an excellent educational tool. Jamael |