EME2040 Alexander Amenta Blog

Adaptive technologies are increasingly helpful to learners with disabilities. For example, if a student is dyslexic they need help understanding how the phonics of a word are put together to form the basic sounds required to sound the word out. Now if a student ever has trouble understanding a word they can use a text to speech app that allows them to hear the word as it's read and can even have google dictionary sound out the word syllable by syllable. I actually will be using this technology with a dyslexic student that I am tutoring over Skype. I will be teaching her with a particularly demanding book for syllables, and phonic stresses because it contains many Spanish names that require breaking down the word syllable by syllable. The challenges of using adaptive technology in the classroom are that these technologies often cost a fair amount due to their innovativeness. That being said there are numerous free websites that can be used to go around these costs. One that is ver

For my ILP #2, I had the pleasure of hearing David Wiley the keynote speaker talk about the research of OER technology, and it was eye-opening. It turns out that the rising textbook prices in college courses actually keeps more than 45% of students from registering for a specific class because the textbook costs too much. Not only that but only 21% of students said that financial aid covers all their textbook costs. Because of this lack of funding, 67% of students who take a course don't buy the textbook, 48% take fewer courses if they do buy the textbooks, 26% drop the course, and 21% withdraw from the course. Of the students that take a course without buying the textbook 38% of students earning a poor grade, and 20% of these students fail the course. In light of all of this when the students do buy their textbooks on average 2.6 of those textbooks they never use! To combat this detrimental influence of costly textbooks blocking access of knowledge to potential learners, OER tec

Facebook is a great tool for planning events and even using it as a makeshift website. The amount of advertising you get for the amount of money you invest ($0) is unbeatable on facebook. If you want to coordinate a meeting with other teachers, plan a field trip, or even conduct a poll with students, Facebook gives you all of these options. Another interesting concept that I have thought of using twitch or youtube live to set up streaming sessions of me teaching a literary concept, or perhaps breaking down a significant piece of literature while live streaming would allow the viewers to type out questions as I talk. Allowing me to answer questions as if they were in a traditional classroom.

 My experience with Twitter as a platform for sharing and discovering new information related to technology has been enlightening. I used to hate twitter because it was so politically charged by people who rarely knew what they were talking about. But since my twitter is only stuff related to education technology, and other interesting research that could be really critical to education and teaching philosophies. My Web Design assignment using Weebly was surprisingly intuitive and easy, you literally drag and drop what you want to add to the web page! I was never frustrated when I was using Weebly everything worked seamlessly, I definitely can see myself using this platform to make future web sites for myself. As I was creating it I realized that there was nothing stopping me from actually have a digital classroom run in combination of an updated Weebly and Live streams on either Twitch or Youtube. Diigo is also a neat tool to learn how to organize the massive amount of content