New Directions in IDT

I feel that e-learning environments have a future in special education.  While the use may not be broadly used, I think it could make a huge difference in the lives of some of our most fragile learners.  The current method used to educate children with medical issues so severe that attending school would endanger them is frequent visits from a home-bound teacher.  The amount of time spent with the teacher does not come close to the hours that other children spend.  Additionally, these children are often very isolated and miss out on the socialization that school offers.  There have a few trials (and hopefully accompanying research will be out soon) of students attending school using e-learning via a stand in robot with the child’s live feed as the face.   According to the ABC News report, the parents seem to be much happier with this arrangement compared to the home-bound teacher method.  

Rich media, when used correctly, will add a great deal to the education of students with special needs.   Whether the visual is needed because the student is unable to successfully read the text or because the specific disability shows visual processing as a strength (autism, for example).  Usually, line drawings are the best for children in my classroom, especially when they are created piece by piece while the child watches. 

I feel that virtual worlds will have a significant place in special education, especially for social learning.  For example, learning to communicate in a typical, socially accepted way requires a lot of practice, with many partners.  Virtual worlds can allow students to watch social interactions and hopefully in the future to interact with a virtual person to practice social interactions (think sim with Siri-type design). 

It may take time for specific design for people with special needs, but could be a great benefit to the population.  I look forward to what the future brings!

IDT Positions

I am currently a special education teacher for elementary children with low-incidence special needs.  I am enrolled in the masters program for Educational Technology and this is my first semester.  I wanted to pursue my masters because I need to have one to move into a position where I can help more children with low-incidence disabilities.  I chose this program after accidentally stumbling upon it when looking into the educational leadership program and realizing that this program is an amazing combination of my previous (software engineer) and current (special education teacher) positions.  Upon graduation, I would like to eventually become a district level helping teacher for the program that I work in.

As a district level helping teacher, I would like to use the knowledge I gain about Instructional Design and Technology in three ways.  One is to evaluate and analyse the programs that are developed for the children that we serve.  I feel that sometimes higher level administration pay too much attention to the presentations that they are given and not enough attention to the actual program.  The second way I would like to use my knowledge to design and develop content materials for the students.  I know that the students in my classroom benefit greatly from my materials and I would like to expand that to the district level.  Last, I would like to use my knowledge to achieve better communication between special education teachers.  Each classroom operates as an individual entity, even though we are all attempting to do the same job.  While most grade level teachers meet weekly with their grade level, we rarely meet.  When special ed teachers do meet, it is not to share ideas, but to listen to administration.  I would like to change this using my educational technology knowledge.

There are several organizations mentioned in the book that I think would be beneficial to my future career and continued learning.  A few of those are Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education and Association for Educational Communications and Technology.  I absolutely think that joining these organizations prior to graduating would benefit me.  Not only would it be show my desire to continue learning about my profession, but it would also give me additional reading and information that would help me show my level of knowledge about the field.