Day 3- Fri. July 6th, 2012.

Today was a Conference Day for all MEd. students at Acadia. We had three sessions to attend throughout the day. The session I found that struck a cord the most with me was by Karen Dyke, Principal of Aldershot Elementary, titled "What's Home Got To Do With It?"

I believe in the immense power of positive relationships between school and home and have seen the advantages of strong relationships, as well as how students and families can suffer when there is no relationship. What Karen brought to light today was some of the reasons behind strained relationships between home/school  when her school was temporarily relocated to another building for one school year. She commented on how some parents she used to see all the time had not been around the temporary location and how contacting parents seemed to increasingly difficult.

She commented that the majority of the time it came down to accessibility for the parents, which reminded me of the Universal Design for Learning. Parents felt it difficult to navigate the temporary building, the process of having to ask many people to find and get directions to the staff member they were looking for was cumbersome, the temporary school location- although only 3 km away from the old building, was out of the way of local traffic for people who were getting rides from friends in the community, and the temporary site was an older building with many twists and turns and with structural flaws, such as drafty windows, that parents didn't enjoy the structure itself.

This older building that was uninviting and hard to navigate reminded me of the older, outdated technology we sometimes ask our students to try to navigate. They may become less interested and engaged with older technology because it is not inviting and/or hard to use. Students want to use the newest and easiest technology because that is going to help them achieve the results they desire with ease instead of frustration.

Technology is changing at a rapid rate- so much so many kids do not know how to use many of the devives their parents used growing up. Here is a video I found illustrating this.

      

Technology today is much more user friendly and it is becoming increasinly accessible to more people. Everyone can figure out how to use it and usually through exploration without the need of explicit instruction (if necessary there is always Google to come to the rescue). Here is a video dipicting just this, techonology is so easy to figure out, even a baby can do it! This child is still learning how to string together words to make sentences, and yet he is able to nagivate an iPad.

Imagine the possibilities in the classroom for a student who may be not be able to speak or is selcetively mute, and for the student who has fine motor skill issues, and for the student who is intellectually delayed. . .

You can do so many different things with Apps on an iPad/iPod (each day I am discovering more and more applications) that can be instrumental to student success. Here is a link to some apps that I believe every stduent in my lower elementray class would find a enjoy.