Blog Post #7

Adaptive technology is technology that is used to help students with disabilities. Adaptive technologies allow students who have trouble reading, writing, and learning to do those three abilities as best as possible. An example of an adaptive technology would be word prediction. Word prediction allows students with spelling issues or physical impairments to complete a thought without typing out the full word. Word prediction is such a simple feature that can help so many students with writing and allow them to finish what they need at a faster pace. Another adaptive technology that I believe could be very helpful is something I have never heard of, a Braille printer. Braille printers are able to print words in Braille and can greatly help visually impaired students. I do not personally know anybody that has used some of the adaptive technologies for learning purposes. The only issues I see with adaptive technologies in the classroom are funding issues. I feel that something such as a Braille printer would be very expensive, therefore limiting how impactful certain technologies could be for students with disabilities.

The main skill I learned while working on the website was how to create a website. I had created a website when I was in elementary school but that was with a group and it was very simple. I used Wix to create my website for EME and, to me, it was much easier than Weebly. I felt that I got better and better as I created my website, added images, and edited text. I liked that I was able to choose a template and then completely customize it to my liking and how it would best benefit my students, just as a teacher would do. To make it better, next time I could do more editing and add more material to each page. The website helped me by giving me experience in engineering a class website that was easy to navigate and benefited both students and parents. Here is the link to my site https://jsb16g.wixsite.com/joshbsite

Before EME2040, I hadn't heard of Diigo. Diigo is actually a very useful annotating and reasearch tool. Diigo has showed me how to annotate articles easily and I like how students have the ability to highlight and comment on certain pieces of text. Diigo could be used in the classroom as a great group research tool. Having the ability to see other students' and even teachers' annotations is a major help and shows how beneficial collaborative learning could be. Even if you're not working in a group, Diigo is great because it allows anybody to easily annotate and navigate websites; the best part is that your work is always saved on to Diigo's website. Professionally, Diigo could be imperative to a classroom because it will allow me to go and annotate a website and then show my students what I believe is important to their learning. Diigo seems to give students, teachers, and any professional endless opportunities to research in a more interactive manner.