Writing Task Analysis

This week we had the opportunity to gain insight on students who are struggling with writing. We watched two videos of students that were extremely intelligent yet hit road blocks with their writing. We then had the opportunity to examine the extremely complicated process involved in writing a simple paragraph. Much like the reading process there are so many areas where students can run into difficulties if a small portion of that process is not working. It will be interesting to further examine the writing process and learn about the different measures that can be introduced to help some of these kids.

A Kursweil Night

Tonight we worked as a group of 5 to create a blog committed to teaching viewers how to use Kursweil 3000. 5 of us divided up different portions of the program last week and worked at researching our own sections of the program. Tonight, we all attempted to dump our findings into a blog as 1 continious post and ran into a few bugs. I think we can iron this problem out and in the end we hope to have a blog site that will teach viewers how to use this program because it is truly an amazing program. This video does explain the reading tool bar which I was responsible for posting.

Webinar and Scavenger Hunt

This week I had the opportunity to take a look at two recorded webinars via ONLINE Blackboard. The webinars titled Apps for Reluctant Readers and Apps for Reluctant Writers were hosted by Barb Welsford who spent a couple of hours highlighting different apps for students struggling with reading and writing. I enjoyed this as it was easy to follow and not only did she describe how to use the apps but explained what type of students may benefit from using the different apps and why.

Tonight, we had our class online using ONLINE blackboard and although it wasn't working perfectly, it was a great experience. We spent some time on a scavenger hunt for apps and were given a different urls to explore.

First, I checked out STARFALL and played around with ABC, Learn to Read, It's Fun to Read and I'm Reading. I thought that each of the programs were very useful and appropriate for emergent readers. The phonics instruction in these programs would be fun for kids because they were colorful and interactive. They also allowed students to self-direct instruction. The strategies that each program offered would be effective tools for all teachers to use in their classrooms.

Second, I checked out EAROBICS and checked out GameGoo. I played a number of games including: Squanky the Tooth Taker Quiet Quest for Opposites, Fearless Friends, Wizards and Pigs Poetry Pickle and Monkey Business. The first game was a great way to teach opposite vocabulary to students. Fearless Frieda was a phonics program that teaches students how to spell different words and rewards them by having Frieda jump high on her skateboard. The Wizard and Pigs Poetry Pickle program is a higher level petry game that teaches kids about Rhyme, Alliteration and Rhythm. monkey Business is a fun program that asked the user to build sentences and bridges in the process so the monkey can travel across water. All of these programs were interactive, fun and appropriate for students struggling with word recognition, context and sentence structure and usage.

Third, I checked out NATURAL READER,a text to speech program. This is a free program and easily downloaded on a PC or MAC. The program simply coverts your text into speech. I actually pasted a paragraph from our school newsletter into the program and the reader (you can choose) read back the text. Although the speech wasn't perfect, it did a decent job and did I mention it was free? Great for kids who struggle to read small or large amounts of text or for those who need to hear what they have written to see if their ideas are clearly stated.

I am now looking at UDTECHTOOLKIT and am finding it to be a comprehensive site with tons of useful programs that would benefit all levels of writers and readers. So far I looked at the graphic organizer section of this site and found some amazing programs to help students create maps and diagrams to support their writing. This site will need a lot of perusing time. I will spend a lot of time here.

Great night of exploring!