February 23, 2013 Day 4

We were introduced to Ruben R. Puentedura in today's class. He is the founder of a consulting company in New England that specializes in educatonal technologies to help tranform the classroom experience for students. He developed the SAMR Model for selecting, using and evaluating technology in education. His blog is available on the following website. He posts his presentations to different organizations and his work with the Maine Learning Technology Institute is outlined as well. The amount of information available on his site is overwhelming to say the least but it is a great site to wander in for information on integrating technology into the classroom. I really like the SAMR Model for educational technology integration.

• S - Substitution - The technology introduced acts as a direct substitute for something else. There is no change in function.
• A - Augmentation - The technology introduced acts as a direct substitute and improves function.
• M - Modification - The technology introduced allows for significant task redesign.
• R - Redefinition - The technology allows the completion of new tasks that were once thought beyond reach.

This makes me think back to our first class in assistive technology when Barb asked us to think about our goals for a student. Was is compensation or remediation? We need to be clear on our goals when introducing technology. This doesn't mean that our goals can't change as our students learn and grow, we just need to know what we want our students to be able to accomplish.

The website can be found at www.hippasus.com  I recommend taking some time and having a look!

We also discusses PECS today in class. That stands for picture exchange communication system. It is an alternative and augmentative communication system that allows for non-verbal communication for people with communicative, cognative and/or physical disabilities. When I looked PECS up in Wikipedia it spoke about the 6 phases of PECS Protocol. These range from using a single picture to initiate communication to the user answering questions and interacting with their environment.  Many augmentative and alternative communication systems are labour-intensive to create and cumbersome for students to use. Today in class groups presented the communication boards they created for a casestudy they created using Proloquo2go.  The program is easy to use. The most complicated part of using this app is considering the needs of the user. Their age, previous experience using other communication devices, physical and cognative challenges, ability to follow multistep instructions. I enjoyed the presentations by the other groups, they included thingd in their presentations that I hadn't thought of. A great learning experience!

The difference between a communication device such as BoardMaker and Proloquo2Go I think is portability. BoardMaker is a system of pictures that can be put together to make sentences, ask questions, answer questions etc. I feel the problem with this system is that as the user's communication skills improve, the boards become more complex, and therefore less portable. It is no longer efficient for the user. BoardMaker is also very labour intensive to create. The creation of the boards, cutting, laminating and sorting the pictures and creating the boards is very time consuming. Once our user's needs and capabilities were established, the boards were quick to create. The devices that the users would use to run the Proloquo2Go app are portable and the devices are the same as what all the other children are using. This device does not separate them from their peers, it will help them to blend in more.
Below are some examples of manual communication boards. It is easy to see where frustration could be a problem with these systems. An iPad or iPod Touch with an app would be so much more user friendly!

VS

For me there is no contest!





Today we revisited Pic Collage. We used this app during our first course with Barb. It was a fun app that both my own two children and my school children enjoy using. When parents come to me to tell me thay are pulling their children from school for a week or two and ask me to put together a work package I recommend Pic Collage. They can capture memories from their vacation and write about them either whie they are away or use them as writing prompts during writers' workshop when they return.

Our assignment today was to come up with 5 uses for Pic Collage in our classrooms. I teach a combined 1/2 French Immersion class. It is not always easy to find resourses in French for areas of our curriculum such as health, science and Social Studies. I worked with Tiffany and we came up with the following ideas.

This is a health activity for Grade One. The students need to be able to identify foods that make a healthy snack and foods that are a not so healthy snack. This Pic Collage allows the student to drag the food items to the column where they think they belong.

 The students can once again drag the pictures to the correct location for this Grade Two Science outcome. It can then become a talking or writing prompt.

A Pic Collage is certainly a fun way to make three digit numbers for a Grade Two math outcome. This activity can be used as a centre. The students can roll three dice or choose three nimber cards to make a three digit number. They can then use the Pic Collage to model the number they made with the dice or cards. It can also be used to order numbers if the students use a combination of three digits to create the largest or smallest possible numbers.

We also created a matching game to help young students with vocabulary aquisition in a second language. This would be a great centre activity.

Pic Collage can also be used to create webs. The templates available with this app are numerous and can fulfill many objectives. This is a web we use with Grade One students to help them with writing personal narritives. It is a great writing prompt!

Another app that Barb wanted us to look at is Book Creator. We spent so much class time creating Pic Collages that we ran out of classtime. So I went looking to see what Book Creator had to offer a Grade One/Two teacher. Each year in September/October I create a class book about me students. It serves many purposes. The children interview the student choosen for that day. The pose questions in French and the interview subject must respond in French. I record the responses to the questions so the children see the written output to this mostly oral activity. We could use Book Creator to complie our interviews. We could include a picture of the child, a vidoe clip of the interview and type a biography of the student based on the responses they gave to the interview questions. The students could them share this book with their families at home as most of my students have access to an Apple product at home. This app could be used for creating class books after a field trip or guest speaker, creating math story problems, rewriting popular stories and including themselves in the story or rewriting the ending, writing instructions such as a recipe or a how to book. Another use I love as a French Immersion teacher is that you can create books to help teach vocabulary. Each bookm can be created around a theme such as food or clothing. I love how you can use or own pictures and embed your own videos. A great motivating feature!  

I have added a YouTube tutorial for Book Creator.