EDUC 630: Technology Practices for Instructional Improvement

This week's theme is to reflect on what you gain from this class, and I have discovered that keeping up with new technologies and improvements used in education is a challenging task that does not always get priority. Being asked to research and discuss new ways of presenting material forced me to step out of my comfort and look for challenges and new ways to present material. Assistive technology is something that I am familiar with because there are students currently in my classes and my school using tools like that, for example, braille keyboards, screen readers, and screen magnifiers, but they do not teach us this in pre-planning; they barely talk about it, and it is only to the select teachers that are teaching a student with disabilities which that is a disadvantage because if we get together and plan for extracurricular activities or social activities, the students will benefit a lot. Another thing that forced me to grow is to learn how to be concise and stick my videos to ...

Infographic             From software programs such as screen magnifiers, speech-to-text, closed captions, speech recognition, screen readers, and educational games to hardware such as braille keyboards, robots, interactive handheld devices, and VR and AR headsets, assistive technology is being used by teachers in classrooms to help students with disabilities participate in classroom activities more independently.           Incorporating these assistive technology resources in classrooms has been slow due to lack of teacher training, unawareness of resources, and social stigma. Training with assistive devices seems to be limited, most of the time, to teachers who currently have students with disabilities in their classrooms, and because of that, awareness of these by a large number of educators is minimal. Efforts on the part of special needs educators, trainers, and administrators must be made to bring awareness to thes...