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Websites and Adaptive Technology (BJ7)


With Twitter, my experiences are getting more and more positive and effective as the semester has moved on. I keep retweeting and commenting on posts from popular education sites, and some of them have actually responded, saying that they are happy someone in school is following what they are saying and how they hope that I continue to follow their tweets. With this interaction, I felt like Twitter was more than just a classroom assignment; I am actually networking with other educators, so I hope that this experience will be effective so much that it will help me with my career later on. Furthermore, using Twitter has taught me how to network in unusual places. I was not expecting to ever get a response from these famous accounts, but by them responding to me, I have learned that networking can happen where we least expect it. I've even gotten into contact with the principal of Hillsborough High School, a school in my county, and from our Twitter interactions he has concluded that when I am ready for a job to come find him. This connection shows me one of the benefits of using Twitter, which I had no idea could be a conclusion from a social media site. Also, another benefit of using Twitter is that it connects you with so many resources. I am constantly clicking on new articles that others have tweeted about education policy updates in Florida because so much is going on with Governor DeSantis taking Common Core away, and with people tweeting many different opinions and websites, using Twitter to see all this has been very beneficial to me. As far as issues go, though, I am not experiencing any problems right now.

From this web design website, I have gained new skills of website building and visual design. With the skills of website building, I have never created a website from scratch before. But, with building this website, I have mostly learned to be patient with things that aren't working like how I want them to. For example, on my home page I have pictures with buttons for all the other pages. However, I couldn't figure out how to link the buttons for a good twenty minutes, which made me very frustrated. After I took a couple of minutes away from the screen, when I came back I was much calmer and able to figure it out, so I need to remember in the future to just walk away for a minute so that I won't loose time due to frustration. Also, with my website design skills, I got a lot better at figuring out how to work education weebly. It took a lot of trial and error, but now I can say that I am at least familiar with the program. Furthermore, the other set of skills I crafted was visual design. I have a lot of experience with design on paper, but on the internet the designs are much different. With this assignment  though, I was able to try out different designs, and I think I ended up with an effective one. Overall, with this assignment I really liked the idea of creating a website because no matter what field I am in, I know that I will need to know how to make a website. There wasn't anything that I particularly didn't like about the assignment; I felt like the guidelines were realistic and really helped give me ideas for what to do on pages. Next time, I will want to play around with all the available features that weebly has so that in my career as an educator (which I just got into my program yay!) I can have a teacher website that is highly useful for students and parents. Actually, I will probably keep what I have and modify it for my teaching needs.

My website can be found here.




Adaptive technology, as I understand it, are technological tools that help students see and understand information presented in a technological environment. Adaptive technology supports learners by making information more accessible to what they need to succeed. For example, if a student is slightly deaf, then closed captions helps lessen that gap that would be there between that student and those that could hear, say, a video. Assistive technology is pretty much the same thing, but instead of a focus on physical disabilities, it focuses on helping students with learning disabilities. It helps support these students by giving them tools to help them with whatever they struggle with. For example, my sister is dyslexic, so on her computer, she has this super advanced spelling tool that has learned what letters she continually mixes up, and everything she types a word with those letters, it'll orally ask her if she meant "b as in boy or d as in dog." With this technology, I could see a couple of challenges rising. For one, what if a student is both hard of seeing and hearing? Is there a solution for them? Also, what if there is a student that is hard of seeing but is in a quite place with no headphones that they can't work on what they need to? What then? There are just so many possible cases where it could be that a tool doesn't exist for the student, so I just don't know for sure that my classroom will be able to provide every tool that my students need. Also, what if my school doesn't have the funds to provide these adaptations? Yes, it is against the law to not provide these things, but situations fall through the cracks all the time, so if I can't accommodate some of my students, how will I utilize technology at all in the classroom?

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