In Class Workout #14: Assistive Technology

The Ease of Access Center provided by Windows could be a very helpful tool in the classroom, especially for students with special needs. It has a bunch of tools that allows using the computer to be a lot easier for students who might be challenged in some way. It offers tools such as a screen magnifier, which makes images on the computer screen larger, and a narrator, which narrates words on pages that you navigate to. It also has an assessment that can show you what tools would be helpful for you based on your special needs.

Text to Speech is not only a great tool for students with special needs, but also it can be useful in other classroom settigns as well. You basically type in a word, phrase, paragraph, etc., and the Text to Speech says out loud exactly what you wrote in the text box. It also contains quite a number of different dialects other than simple English for which your text can be said. It has Spanish, French, Chinese, and many more language dialects that one can chose from. I can definitely see myself, as an English teacher, having my students put papers they have written into this tool to have it read back to them. I think it could really help them catch errors or strange sentences even when they do not want to proofread.

The Online Stop Watch is a very useful tool that could easily be integrated into the classroom for everyday use or activities. Basically it is a free online tool that allows you to set a timer for yourself, and whenever that timer goes off, a notification tells you. You can also set a timer that you can start and stop. This could be very useful in the classroom in the fact that it could be used to time students for test or quizzes. Also, If I as a teacher only wanted to spend a certain amount of time on a certain part of a lesson, I could use the timer and it would tell me. I could also be working on something on the computer, and it could notify me when the time that I allowed myself to work has elapsed. It really is just a great tool that could be used in a multitude of ways.

Station 6: Persuasive Speaking Survey

Link to the google form:http://spreadsheets.google.com/gform?key=tN1PiH0mCx8Njwbhzw4d7IA&hl=en#

Link to the spreadsheet: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dE4xUGlIMG1DeDhOandiaHp3NGQ3SUE6MA

Part 1:About the Station

• Persuasive Speaking Survey



• I didn't really have a group, but I worked with Spencer and Diedre a little bit.



• We had to create a survey based on the possibility of the 45/46 bypass being redone, and then have people answer it.



• We created the survey using a Google form and then asked people on Facebook to take the survey.



• I came up with my own questions and asked my own friends on Facebook to take the survey.

Part 2: Your Work

• I was told to create a Google form and come up with five questions about the 45/46 bypass. A link to both my editing page and a link to the actual survey are at the top of this post. There is also a screenshot of my editing page which is the last image in order from top to bottom. I was then told to get at least three other people to take the survey. There is a screenshot to the responses so far and here is a link to the response page http://spreadsheets.google.com/gform?key=tN1PiH0mCx8Njwbhzw4d7IA&hl=en#chart. A screenshot of the actual survey is at the top of the post.


• We basically worked on our own, so all of my answers are already displayed.

Part 3: What did you think?

• I liked learning how to use a Google form as a survey. It was also cool to be interactive with many people on a wide scale. As a teacher, I like the idea of letting the students come up with their own questions and giving them a chance to think critically.


• Really the only thing that I didn't really like about the activity was trying to get three people to take the survey at a moments notice. As a teacher, I probably would find a way to have other students in the class take each survey.


• Really the most interesting thing about this was just learning how to make a quiz or a survey using a google form. It is a quick and easy way to make an online quiz, and I like it alot.

Evaluating Teacher Websites for Secondary English

The website on the bottom is Lexipedia.com. It seems to be powered and sponsered by iSeek. The purpose of this website is to educate students in a fun and inventive way on word meaning and usage. You type in a word, press search, and it gives any part of speech for that word as well as synonyms, antonyms, and fuzzynyms. It also provides a cool web graph that is fun to play around with. This site could be advertised easily for students and teachers who want to look up words for any purpose. I could see myself using this website as a dictionary in my future clasroom. It is a dictionary, thesaurus, and more. There is a link to share this website on facebook. I think that this website could be extremely helpful in the classroom.

The website featured on the top is writingfix.com. It is sponsered by the Northern Nevada Writing Project. This website can be used to give teachers fun ideas for writing prompts and lessons. It also gives resources to help teachers with teaching how to write. Advertising for this website would be well recieved by any teacher and is also on twitter and facebook. I can definitely see myself using this to come up with ideas for writing assignments and to help me when I find myself looking for answers. There is a link to the NNWP website as well. This is a great tool for anyone teaching writing for educational purposes.