Clicker 5/Cloze Pro

Before class, I experimented a bit with the Cloze Pro demo disk. I also found learninggrids.com to have a great bank of activities from all content areas. I found that actiivites could easily be tailored for students of all needs and levels. I thought it was going to be mainly an elementary program, but I thought of ways to incorporate this to courses at the high school level. Just exposing such programs to students with reading and writing difficulties allows them to experiment with terms and pictures that match and it may give them a way to find some success in class.

Nov 19 Writing tools

Being introduced to these software programs to assist students with the writing process has been very eye opening. At first, I thought cloze pro would be suited for Elementary students, but as I explored it and worked withit, I thought of students I teach that would benefit from the use of such a program. I am trying to organize a time that I can teach and familarize some of the PSAs with this program as well as Clicker 5. If you aren't familiar with the benefits of the program and the simplicity of setting up activities then it won't be utilized. As I was reviewing Cloze PRo on line I discovered there are plenty of free activities on www.learninggrids.com. I registered on this website to see what it offers. It is vey helpful and lots of great ideas for activities for Cloze Pro, Clicker 5 and Write Online. I look forward to creating a few of these activities.

Our I touch Experience

I just wanted to share an update on our student who now is trying and LOVING the itouch to communicate with peers, teachers and family. He is a happy, smiling guy who now can communicate what he is wanting to say in a lot less time. He takes this tool home (which is cool) and his mom asks him to say something that he has wanted to say for a long time.. SHe gives him some prompts like: I am sure you have wanted to say, "mom you are having a bad hair day" or "Mom, you aren't going out like that".... Well she turns around as she hears the I touch beginning to speak the sentence he wanted to say to his mom. "MOM I love you" is what he says. His mom told me she looked up and there he was a GRIN from ear to ear.. Well there is a heart warming, tear jerking incredible memory for all involved in the I touch being used as a communicative device for this 17 year old teenager.

Writing Task Analysis

Wow, we pick up the pen and we write our thoughts as they come. Seems like a natural process, but when you are asked to think about and write down the steps it takes for someone to write down a thought or a sentence it is amazing the steps we forget about and don't think how difficult it can be for some. Just completing that task allowed me to focus on some of my own students who have difficulty in some of those capacities. I reflect on how I get them started and what they are doing to get their thoughts down. During a typical English 10 Plus class, one can walk into our classroom and see some students using draftbuilder, inspiration, microsoft publisher, a paper copy of a graphic organizer and some just writing on a piece of looseleaf with a pen or pencil. If we present these options to our students they will choose one that works for them. Students want to succeed they just need the tools to help them get there.

November 5

Having taught high school my whole career, it was quite an eye opener this week to learn about reading remediation software options. As I viewed these and had the opportunity to participate in one, I was glad to see how appealing they are to younger students. They are very interactive. They also had characters that definitely made it appealing to children as well as fun while they were learning sound recognition, rhyming words, and word recognition. I did think of students in high school that this would be useful for that have a much lower cognitive level. We tend not to think of that at high school level, but I will certainly recommend this for 2 of our current students. I learned a great deal this evening about reading remediation and with some of the comments that came from the elementary teachers in class how it benefits their students and how they use it.
The start to finish books will help one of my current students and he has already begun to read the Ali book.

Presentation night

I was curious to see how the groups would use kurzweil for their particular students. I was wondering how each level would use kurzweil. It was interesting to note the varying needs of students that use it and how they use it. I have used Kurzweil with many students over the past few years. It was great to use my role as Literacy coach to assist in creating a unit with Ian for another course for a student I know and have worked with. We wanted to show the group a bit more about Mac, and it was a learning experience for me not to have to scan in the article we found on EBSCO, but to create a PFD and then it was there and save some time using ADOBE. I must say I am asking Santa for a Mac. I think I am converted. We are looking at perhaps trying Kurzweil with Ben for writing tests.

Week 3 Oct 8

In this week's class, we explored Kurzweil. I am familiar with Kurzweil and have seen many LD students self confidence with regards to reading improve incredibly. It allows that student to stay in class and read at the same rate as most of her peers with the aid of the IPod. I did learn some things about Kurzweil this week that I did not know, and that I will implement with my studdents this year. WE have found Kurzweil has given those students a sense of independence. Instead of being pulled out of class to have a test read to them, they can simply use this software package to read the test to them. I learned this week that I can set up the test so the student can write the answers using Kurzweil as well. It is exciting this year to have Ian on board to implement this in more than just my class, or just me scanning tests and novels for students who do not have spare classes. Ian and I are looking at ways to purchase the Kurzweil flash drives so then the student may not even have to leave the classroom to write a test.

I have introduced this software to many students over the past 2 years since Barb had the in service day to demonstrate to the PST's how to implement this program with our students. Whether it is being utilized in the schools totally depends on how comfortable the instructor is with the program. Because of the success we have had at our school, Ian and I are hoping to have more Kurzweil programs in the computer lab and English classrooms. It is such a powerful tool for those students who have difficulty reading and are diagnosed with a learning disability. To them, it is cool, and it really just looks like they are listening to music as they read, as are other students.