Technology and Special Education

One thing that METC accomplished was to reinforce over and over that we have to change our way of teaching and reaching our present day students.  Meg Ormiston presented the keynote entitled Culture Clash! Wired Kids in Text Driven Classrooms.  The remark that she stressed many times is that we are boring our kids and “worksheeting” them to death in our classrooms.  We have all of these engaging creative tools at the click of a mouse and most of us don’t use them to their potential.  She then challenged us to use multimedia tools and activities to engage our students and provide alternatives to learning with numerous handouts.  Great examples that were shown to us included:

• Want to activate schema before your students read All is Quiet on the Western Front – try this.
• Think of alternatives to written book report.
• Explore Google Lit Trips
• Discovery Streaming

So where do I go from here?  There were 3 of us from our district who attended the conference and we all came back home filled with new ideas along with stronger beliefs about the need for the read/write web in our curriculums.  So we first made a list of requests to our technology committee such as making sure that all computers have access to such programs as Google Earth and Sketch Up along with read/write tools such as blogs and wikis.  We are sharing alot with other staff, administration, and hopefully our school board.  One of our ways of doing this is by creating a wiki sharing the beliefs, tools, and resources from METC.  The world is changing and we can’t be left behind!