Thursday, December 17, 2009

Two Best Chapters and Why

In Jurkowski, I can't really decide between either the chapter on Professional Development or the one on School Library Websites. We are already using BrainPop and UnitedStreaming in our school environment, but I found the other sites recommend in the Prof. Dev. chapter to be very interesting. Some require a subscription fee after the trial period, but I am considering recommending some of these to our district. The School Library website provided me with many good suggestions for setting up and maintaining a site which is both professional, interesting for students and attractive. Our current school website has actually covered all four of the priorities list which Jurkowski recommends.
In Courtney, I enjoyed the Podcasting chapter. I have had little experience in this area and this chapter provided some practical suggestion for uses and a list of websites available for further information.

Saturday, December 5, 2009

Week #14: AT curriculum and evaluation

The first paragraph mentioned that October is Disability Awareness Month. At our school, our wonderful team in the Special Ed department actually celebrates quite extensively. One item they run is the MD (multiply disabled) cafe where the students in the program run a cafe for a day. Faculty members come in during their break to purchase items that these special students have made. Food items, handmade crafts, personally illustrated writing papers, and flowers/plants grown by these students are offered for sale. Proceeds from this day go to fund field trips for the students in the program.
Next, I reviewed the lessons plans. I was very impressed. In fact, I would like to add disabilities as a topic for my sophomore research paper. Currently, they are required to write on a social issue, but I think that having them research a disability might actually help them to be more understanding and sympathetic towards these students in our school and community.
Some of the links I attempted to follow were not working.
What have I learned? I think these activities have made me much more cognizant of the difficulties faced by those who are disabled.
I will definitely speak to our teachers from the Special Education department about the tutorial and provide them links to the sites.
Lastly, I'll provide a link to the site here:

I hope others will find the site as helpful as I did.

Hopefully, this time my link will work:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/CSLA2Team