Blog Post #12

I am an elementary/special education major and my original goal for this assignment was to show how technology could be used even in a special education classroom at an early age. As soon as I read this assignment, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. For a couple of weeks now, I have been working on Smartboard lessons for my daughter. She now has numbers, shapes, animals and the alphabet. Each one allows her to interact with the lesson via the Smartboard by drawing out the shape, number or letter. The animal one allows her to click on the picture of the animal and hear its sound as well as see the name of the animal. As I practiced and practiced with her to make sure she knew all of the animals before we made the video, I made one mistake: we never practiced on the Smartboard. This afternoon we took our trip to the lab to show off how smart she is. Everything she had learned prior to this trip was erased. Her fascination of the Smartboard took over and she found it necessary to learn how to use the pens and eraser. I must admit, I have learned first hand that a lesson will never go the way it is planned. This incident forced me to take a new direction with my assignment. Did I mention that my daughter is not even two yet and she was capable of learning how to use the pens and eraser within a matter of minutes. Had we spent a day or two on what I had planned for us to do, I know she would have master it. I realize that teaching a toddler to use a Smartboard is not the same as teaching special education but for some students, their attention span and mental capacity is similar.
My assignment is to share a lesson in your area(special education/elementary education) to the Smart Exchange. Students learn from one another and I feel that it is important for teachers to do so as well. By sharing lessons to the Smart Exchange we are helping our community of colleagues.

Directions
1.) Watch these videos on Special Education and Technology for Special Education. I also suggest watching this video on a the day of a special education teacher. Think about how technology could help her in her everyday teaching and lessons.
2.) Create a lesson that would be used to teach special education students using the Smartboard.
3.) Sign into SmartExchange or signup if you haven't already done so.
4.) Click on Share a resource.
5.) Upload your lesson to the appropriate location.
6.) After sharing to the Exchange, please include a link on your blog so that others can find your lesson.
7.) Also, leave summary explaining why you chose this particular lesson to share.

My SmartExchange Lesson
I chose to share a lesson on animals to the Exchange. My thought behind this was to teach simple animal sounds for a special education class that my not yet be distinguishable. If you notice that some slides are not animals- I know. I wanted to mix in some things that were not living to inspire creativity of the children. When you ask a child "what sound a balloon makes?" or "what sound a banana makes?" it will stimulate the brain to come up with what sound a balloon really does make. I think that at such a young age, like my toddler, the attention span is hard to control, so I mix it up a bit.