July 16

Today was my first experience with "live' online learning. I can honestly say it was a positive

learning experience for me.
The Black Board Collaborative was very user friendly as a participant but am not sure what it involves to be the administrator.....
When we were asked to write a letter to the minister to request iPads for our school it proved to be quite the process for me. First I had to locate a pen and pencil in my bag because I have only been typing for the past two weeks! I had to think about every process involved in writing the letter and it was exhausting because writing has always come easy to me! Thinking of what to say was not too hard because I knew what I wanted to say and the format of a formal letter. I picked up my pen and off I went! When I thought about the skills I need to do that it was huge. I have worked with students who are not able to do what I take for granted and it is very frustrating for them. AT to the rescue :)



Here is an amazing outline/graphic of the writing process provided from the professor:

Here is a link to a great blog on AT created by my professor:

 http://writingatbwelsford.blogspot.ca/AT Blog

In this Blog you will see two videos at the top. We watched these two videos during our online learning today. The first video is by about an occupational therapist talking about the important of children core muscle development/ability when it comes to their fine motor processes. One part I found particularly  interesting is that when she is assessing students she said she often "looks under the desk" to see what their bodies are doing. I have never thought about this.
The next video is about all the low tech options there are available for writing. Some of the tools were awesome for example the writing bird:

The following apps were discussed and/or displayed for the class:

Dragon app.

My experience with this app is that it is an "ok" app but has a limited audience for in school. I tried to use it in elementary school for voice dictation but it was not successful due to articulation issues for my students. My professor stated that she had only recommend this app for three students in her school board and this surprised me.








The next app that we explored was co writer. I really

was impressed by this app and plan to use this in the coming academic year. I liked this app much better than word Q which I used this past year. I liked the feature of the topic dictionary because  they are personalized for the student and subject. For this app I think that it is important to consider that students who use this they require a certain level of "knowledge" about what they want to write about. A lot of my struggling writers have what I call "writers block" and have trouble with their ideas and thinking about what to say.

When it comes to "planning for writing" the app Inspiration is a great app to use. I have used this app before and I think it is very straightforward to use. The app provides templates to choose from and you can choose to have a linear display if necessary. I prefer the linear display so I really like this option.

An app that I need to spend some time personally using (tomorrow in class) the clicker sentences app. I enjoyed watching the online demonstrations today but need some time exploring this app on my own.

I am looking forward to playing with these apps on the ipads mini in class tomorrow! During our "lecture" today we were presented with an amazing visual on the writing process but I am going to figure out how to upload this to me blog.....