New Technologies Link Ancient Cultures

Ellis, K. (2002). New Technologies Link Ancient Cultures. Edutopia. Retrieved from:  http://www.edutopia.org/new-technologies-link-ancient-cultures

This article focuses on the First People’s Project, a cultural exchange program that covers five continents. Students from indigenous origins are able to share their stories, poems, art, photographs and videos by posting them online and mailing them back and forth between schools.

Students involved in the project are encouraged to research an area of their own culture and interview elders in their group. After gathering information, students create their own artwork or take pictures/video of dances, sports, chanting and other cultural activities.

The project not only has help students reconnect with their own heritage, but also has sprung an art exchange and humanitarian effort. After watching a video about the poor conditions of a school in Thailand, students decided to help out by sending blankets and raising money for teacher aides, school supplies and even a generator.

Another benefit not specifically mentioned by neither the article nor the video that accompanied it was the student’s interaction with technology and how that has helped them become familiar with computers and the internet by using a very personal and motivating project.

I personally thought that this idea was great and I would love to see it implemented in my own school district. I also thought it could be an excellent class social studies project and instead of just focusing on indigenous people, we could have each member research their cultural heritage and present it with art and words on the internet. 

Teaching Special Kids: Online Resources for Teachers

Starr, L. (2010). Teaching Special Kids: Online Resources for Teachers. Educational World. Retrieved from http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr139.shtml

This article is a great summary of resources for teachers who have children with special needs in their classroom. Although the abundance of information makes searching for answers difficult and overwhelming, the websites featured here are helpful and easy to use. Sites  highlighted in the article offer not only help teachers better understand their special needs students, but also provide simple modifications, lesson plans and activities that can help make life easier for special needs students (and their teachers).

The first groups of websites presented are sites that include helpful lesson plans that include special needs students. Examples of these are the Special Education section of Teachers Helping Teachers, (a site that offers lesson plans for ages K-12), Special Needs, Special Kids (a site that offers information about specific disabilities and additional educational material) and Very Special Hope Page (a site that provides free home pages for children and adults with disabilities).

The next set of websites summarizes are websites that specialize in information about special needs children. Sites overviewed included Misunderstood Kids: Outside the Box and it’s Especially for Teachers page, and Modifications for students with Tourettes Syndrome, Attention-Deficit Disorder, and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (which provides information about simple modifications that can be made to the classroom to make life easier for students with disabilities). Other pages listed were Behavior Home Page, United Cerebral Palsy, The Arc Home Page, 50 Tips on the Management of Attention-Deficit Disorder, and Suggested Classroom Interventions for Children with ADD and Learning Disabilities.  

The article also gives a couple sites with information about assistant programs that will help teachers with special needs students. The two sites included were Assistive Technology Training Online Project and Virtual Assistive Technology Center.

The article also added on several more additional websites that had general information on children with special needs. These were Internet Resources for Special Children, Family Village (the School section), The Instant Access Treasure Chess, The Foreign Language Teacher’s Guide to Learning Disabilities and Office of Special Education (from the University of Virginia).

After reviewing several of these websites, I found most of them to be very helpful, informative and easy to navigate. I especially like the Teachers Helping Teachers site that included how to arrange the classroom, bulletin boards, and classroom introductions to best suite students with learning disabilities. It also gave great tips for the first day of class as well as general survival tips for the classroom. Overall I felt that the article gave great information about the sources available on the web. I will be posting the links to the sites featured in the article on my Delicious account. I will hopefully be posting a like to Delicious on this blog soon.