Blog Journal 8

Adaptive technologies have helped teacher development and student development because they help students with disabilities learn the same lessons as students without disabilities. I haven't needed, nor have my classmates needed, the assistance of adaptive technologies such as a text-to-speech machine or a braille typewriter. These technologies are very helpful in allowing the student with the disability to keep up with the rest of the class who may not have a disability, however there are challenges to these new technologies. Most of these challenges come from determining the right technology to apply to a student with disabilities, then learning how to use that technology (both the teacher and the student). Technology has enabled more interesting learning opportunities for teachers because of the activities that bring teachers together online through social bookmarking, blogs, and Twitter.
As a teacher, Powerpoint is a necessary tool to have in the classroom and to understand how to use. The first stage of Bloom's Taxonomy is remembering and Powerpoint can be used to accomplish this by repeating slides and allowing students to copy down slides so they remember the lesson. The second level is comprehending which can be done with the help of Powerpoint because it puts the teachers words on to a board for the students to visualize, rather than just hear. The third level is applying which Powerpoint can accomplish by providing the students with examples of real world problems, such as in a statistics class. Powerpoint can then help the student analyze (the fourth level of Bloom's Taxonomy) by guiding the student with a step by step, or slide by slide, process of how to analyze and what to look for. Powerpoint is helpful in the last two levels of Bloom's Taxonomy (synthesizing and evaluating) because Powerpoint can put all the information you just learned in a lesson into a few easy slides that the student can summarize on their own.
There are many sites that will keep teachers updated on what to watch for in the technological field of education. This website is about the advancements we will see in educational technology and how they will affect students and teachers. To view the whole website click here.