My Assistive Technology project

Course NYIT -ID79001
Foundations II
Enrique Cestona
Prof. Dr. S. Mc Pherson

MY PROJECT: PUBLIC BROADCASTING SERVICE (PBS)
INTERACTIVE SOCIAL STUDIES WEBSITE

This search has been rather difficult for me, because I do not have students with disabilities like the ones shown in the video watched on the class of
Wednesday, October 11th 2007. I teach Social Studies at High School with more than three thousand students, but I have never been assigned students like the ones of the video. The only few cases of Special Education students I have received were three or four cases for whose exams the Guidance Counselor recommended “Some extra time” allowed. Until I received this notification, there was nothing in the student or performances that coult make me think that they needed special attention.

As a Bilingual Social Studies teacher, the main problem my students may encounter is their relative or poor command of English, plus their lack of expertise
With computers. Theirs is more a case of an environment-related disability
Rather than a genetic one.

Being a neophyte in this issue, I started by doing research about what U.S.
Federal laws have created protection and special treatment for students with disab-
ilities;Then I came across I.D.E.A. (HTTP://IDEA.ED.GOV/EXPLORE/VIEW) and found out that its purpose is “Ensuring that all children with disabilities have available to them a free appropriate public education (FAPE) emphasizes special education and related services designed to meet their unique needs and prepare them for further education, employment and independent living”.

I found that when first created in 1997, the IDEA Act defined Asisstive Technology as as ‘Any item, piece or equipment, or product system, whether acquired commercially off the shelf, modified , or customized, that is used to increase , maintain , or improve the functional capabilities of a child with a disability “( IDEA ,1997, 20, USC, Ch.33, Sec 1401 (25)US). In addition, some authors acknowledge that ”The student may need anything from physical , verbal or visual prompts to high-technology devices and services (Purcell & Grant, 2002).

Another useful guidelines to help me choose Assistive Technology for my students were paragraphs of the 2004 Reauthorized version of IDEA , when it states that Assistive Technologies are “ Useful for improving the academic and functional achievement of the child with a disability to facilitate the child’s movement from school to post-school activities, including postsecondary education, vocational education, integrated employment ;Including supported employment, continuing and adult education, adult services, independent living, or community participation”…and that this “Includes instruction, related services, community experiences, the development of employment and other post-school adult living objectives, and, if appropriate, acquisition of daily living skills and functional vocational evaluation”.

In addition, a good list of how many elements can become “Assistive Technology” can ben found in the website www.ncrel.org , that creates five catheg-
ories of “Assistive Technology” (For vision, for Communication, for access, for hearing, for learning and studying);Each cathegory comprising between ten and twenty devices that can become applicable tools.

Therefore, I came to the conclusion that a good interactive Social Studies
Website could be an excellent example of Assistive Technology.

THE FEATURE:
I researched the internet looking for good Social Studies interactive websites for High Schoolers of grades 9-12, and I checked many companies , like Intellitools (http://www.Intellitools.com), Kurzweiledu (www.kurzweiledu.com) Metropolitan Publishing (www.metrotlc.com) Sopris West Educational Services (http://www.sopriswest.com) and others. However, most of the Asisstive Technologies they create are for grades k-8, and rarely for Social Studies.

In the end, I found that the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) has a website ( www.pbs.org ) that is perfect for my students..


THE FUNCTIONS:
This PBS website provides materials and good practice of skills that my students need: to improve their command of English, to acquire social studies content, to develop internet skills, to enhance their knowledge of the search engines to get information for the school activities and for their personal life, to refine their writing and reading abilities, to increase their deductive and inductive powers.
In particular, this can help the students a lot with the RCT/Regents exam that they have to pass in order to graduate from High School. These exams are about Global History- including many issues of present day international politics- and U.S. History and Government. All the schools are now making the teachers work following the Cooperative Learning System, where the teacher becomes more of a facilitator:
After a brief minilesson carried by the teacher, the student are distributed in groups, given materials to analyze and then they have to create the answers to the group questions collectively.
The PBS website is , in this respect, perfect: It has News Hour extra stories written for students and interactive reports based on stories from the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, the nightly news broadcast on PBS. And the students can choose any subject from a menu comprising Science, Math/ Economics. This meets all the Social Studies RCT/Regents requirements; And the students can work in this website in Cooperative Learning mode.
In addition, this website include a Lesson Plan with subjects that are always important current events affecting the international world.

My plan is to create the usual groups to work in Cooperative Learning mode, and then assign each group to that website: each group will be assigned to search for material about different aspects of a central issue. Following the Cooperative Learning system, Each group will have a)Providers of ideas, b)Note-takers and c)a Group Speaker. The Providers will do the search in the above mentioned website , while the notetaker will coordinate all the materials found into a rational piece of information; And the speaker will present the group’s final answer to the other groups, when in the end all the groups have to share their findings with the other.

One of the advantages of this website I found is that it is interactive: Which means that when you type some words its software will help you re-direct your search if you are going in the wrong direction; Or will suggest the correct spelling of issues you are looking for, if you have typed something wrong and then the query drives you nowhere.

All this software crutches do not mean that the students will not be required to apply and refine their searching abilities , and high order critical thinking when they use this website: They must know how to log on, how to define ,and accurately circumscribe the subject for which they are looking for information; How to analyze if the material –either text, images, videos- they have found is relevant for the subject or not, what are the important points and the accessory details, and also how to write their analysis of the material, providing answers supported by real evidence.

They have the chance of applying all their reading and writing abilities in this task. They will have to apply all the stages of the human thought ( Knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation) described by Benjamin Bloom (http://faculty.washington.edu/krumme/guides/bloom1.html)in his 1956 book;
That are the final goal of the Higher Critical Thinking.

Students working in groups under the Cooperative Learning System do not only meet the High School requirements, but also create a mentality of team work that is an important asset in the students’ professional life. This mentality is expected in most of the present jobs, and it will be increasingly demanded in the next decades.






REFERENCES:

- WWW.PBS. ORG
- HTTP://WWW.INTELLITOOLS.COM
- WWW.KURZWEILEDU.COM
- WWW.METROTLC.COM
- HTTP://WWW.SOPRISWEST.COM