June 5th 2010, Job Fair, I GOT A JOB.....

Well I must admit that I was only present for the morning and we spent that time presenting our Student Profiles and the solution we created on Kesi. It is interesting because of all the bells and whistles, reality is that there are some key advantages to this software and its ability to help students become independent learners.

It seems more and more prevalent that this software would be an asset in the elementary school setting and more students should be introduced to this software to eliminate their anxiety around reading and writing, or the lack thereof. It would appear that the biggest pressure on students in the classroom setting is to be able to read and write using the workshop models that have been established in principle by the school board.

This set the expectation for all students to be active participants in this process, whether they have the skill sets or not. There seems to be several areas that we no longer assess and I was reminded of this during the Bridges conference. Dr. Erickson made a valid point about listening comprehension and the fact that we focus so much on reading and writing that we neglect the listening component. Sometimes this is one of the reasons that the child is having difficulty with sppech the reading and writing process and struggles with the task. Listening is a big part of the understanding and comprehension process, yet we do not assess the level of listening ability for our student population before we decide how to set up the task for success. Students that can not understand the instruction piece or decode the task will become frustrated and disengaged with the learning.

The software that we are presently learning about excites me because I realize that so many of our students could benefit from all the features of this software regardless of their learning styles. Inclusion to me means every student has the benefit of the learning and yet we only offer products to students that have been identified and due to the process it takes extended periods of time to have students assessed and recommended for support, when we should be able to provide support to all our students and vary the software based on student need, not the other way around.

This is a passion of mine to provide all students the opportunity to be exposed to all the services that are available o support learning, there should not be any and, ifs or buts, we have the services and should make them available to our clientele. This would not be as costly as the program planning team, educational psychologists, speech and language specialists; the board owns the rights to most of the software that could be downloaded on the computers in the classroom, computer labs and any where else that a student could have access to this software. Some of the comic makers, and movie makers are free and this would enable students to present their work in graphic novels and pictorials with the aid of software that supports their learning.

I like to share information and believe that every students deserves the best opportunities to achieve academic success and enhance their learning, we do have the software and technology available to do that and now we need to assess the most cost effectve way to make that happen in every classroom.