Mary



=This is my page. = I like hearing about new things...this article was full of new inventions! So much in fact that I think every public school faculty meeting should have several sessions devoted to discussions and demonstrations of adaptive and assisted technology.

These sorts of technologies could put some teachers out of business, At the very least, if teachers had these resources in their stables they could get on with the business of teaching and out of the business of management.

A number of years ago, I read an article in //The New Yorker// magazine about a very wealthy, intelligent SouthAmerican business person who was struck with an awful disease that left him immobilized except for the use of his eyes. A team of computer experts was brought in to help access his abilities and they successfully wrote programs that enabled him to guide a computer mouse on a screen by moving his eyeballs alone. What was invented at the time was clearly the groundwork for the amazing assisted and instructive technologies of today. My guess is that only the very priviledged will be served by these technologies in the near future.

This is a terribly exciting time for growth in technologies, scary but exciting! There are certainly elements of "Big Brother" out there. Still, I'm really interested in seeing these gadgets in action!

Tuesday's Assignment

I had a few minutes waiting for a friend at the Marina so I laptopped in, plugged in and Ghost Busted along in the article for tonight. OK...so there was a little vino involved but that couldn't have hurt much...

The article detailed stategies for improving fluency (reading with expression and speed)for struggling readers. We are using //Read Naturally// at Guilford so I can attest to the success children achieve when exposed to the practices suggested in the article. The strategies of the various programs seem to use many of the same fluency techniques though there are interesting variations. Practicing vocabulary or pre-reading text, keeping track of progress, increasing levels of reading rate as the reader improves are all mentioned in the programs.

I liked the idea of children reading in pairs and child and teacher reading together.

This article seemed to have a lot of good practical suggestions for classroom teachers. Finding time, however, is a problem. If it weren't for our Academic Support person at Guilford, I doubt that I could ever get to a program like Read Naturally on my own.

Again, a really fun day! Playing with the Smartboard was fun but not as dramatic as I expected. I enjoyed the discussions around fluency and the chance to practice recording errors, omissions and substitutions. I think that the articles have been really interesting andI plan to refer back to them.

One of the best parts of this class is getting to interact with persons who have some experience in fluency and testing. I would like some sources of books& literature on the net that I can use with the fourth grade with the T2S software.