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.