I was fortunate to be allowed to attend EdTech 2017 for our school. During the two and a half days, I was able to attend sessions that I felt were very informative and that provided me with additional resources to bring back and share with my colleagues. The majority of the sessions that I focused on attending were geared towards the Google Classroom and also assistive technology. Sessions such as Making Formative Assessment Fun (and free!) and Integrating Online Resources into the Curriculum were a great way to start the conference. On the second day, sessions such as Managing Class with Google Classroom, Struggling with Student Engagement? Send Out an SOS (Strategy, that is)!, and Google Add-Ons Make Life Easy! provided very useful tips and tricks that I was able to take back to share. By far one of the most useful sessions was the Accessibility for Google Drive: A closer look at Add-ons as Assistive Technology session on Friday. Through these sessions I learned of add-ons and extensions such as Formenate, Doc to Form, and PDF Mergy that I feel my colleagues will find beneficial.
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When our Chromebooks were delivered, the YouTube app was pinned to the shelf already. As YouTube is blocked under the generic student login, teachers did not pay any attention to it. It was discovered that under the individual student logins that YouTube is not blocked when several students were using it for entertainment. Directions were sent out via email on how to unpin the app yet several teachers asked for visual help. A video tutorial was created as was a PDF document. It was shared via a Google Folder that was established and shared with all faculty. It was also placed on the shared G drive in the Staff folder.
Although our school has gone 1:1 with Chromebooks, there are times that the students will need to know how to login to the accounts from non-Chromebooks. Within the Gifted and Talented classroom, one of the special education classrooms, and the special area classrooms (PE, Art, and Music), students use Windows-based laptops rather than Chromebooks rather than taking a risk with having students moving throughout the school building with their Chromebooks since they are not equipped with carrying cases. Also, unfortunately at this time, our printers are not set up to be able to connect to the Chromebooks so students must login to their Chrome accounts in order to print any assignments. As teachers move more of their lessons to Google Classroom, it will become more important for students to be able to login to their accounts from home in order to complete assignments. Today, we held three sessions with fourth and fifth grade classes on how to login to their Chrome accounts and the importance of signing out when they were done. Teachers were reminded that the students must use their full email address when logging in rather than the shortened version that is used within the school's network. Many teachers expressed that they would create labels with their home logins and affix them to the students' agendas for reference when needed.
These sessions proved to be quite frustrating for the students as they had difficulty typing in their full email address due to the length of it. Because of this, we had the students log out and in multiple times in order to practice it. A few of the students were still having difficulty but did not give up. On reflection, it would have been beneficial to have had the teachers print their full email addresses prior to beginning this session so that the students had them in front of them rather than having to copy the address from the whiteboard. This session was set up at the request of the special education team to aid them in adding the Read&Write extension as well as to demonstrate its use. It was open for all teachers to attend but only those on the special education team chose to attend. Other teachers expressed that they were comfortable with adding the extension and its use based on the tutorial that was placed on our shared drive and three had expressed that they had already begun using Read&Write.
After spending some time evaluating ChromeVox and Read&Write, the media specialist and I met to go over how the two compare. After discussing which types of websites ChromeVox does not work as consistently with, we decided to stick with introducing Read&Write to the staff to use for oral administration. We decided that I would create a short tutorial for using Read&Write that teachers could use to familiarize themselves as well as their students with the extension.
In order to meet one of the tutorial requests of our teachers, and to meet the special needs of the students that I serve, I began to look more closely at various options for orally administering assignments and assessments when using Google Chrome. During our initial overview, we were introduced to ChromeVox. After using it with various Google Docs, Forms, PDFs, and websites with my own students, I noticed that there were several instances when it would not read aloud the text or would only read portions of the text. During our training overview, the extension Read&Write was also mentioned. After searching and reading several blogs from special education teachers and assistive technology teams, I found that Read&Write is highly thought of and has had success in special education settings. After downloading it and using it with the same Google Docs, Forms, PDFs, and websites that were used when testing ChromeVox, it was found to work with more consistency. After using it with one of my small groups of students, they also indicated that they preferred the voice used in Read&Write over that of ChromeVox.
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S. Thornell
This blog covers the instruction I was able to take part in as part of my Field Experience in Instructional Technology and beyond. Archives
December 2017
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