November 1, 2008

Working hands-on with Kurzweil today was a great way to discover how many possibilities the program offers not only as a teacher designing a reading and/or writing activity, but also the different options that students can have for sharing their knowledge and understanding with the teacher. This is a program that creates many possibilities for differentiated learning activities, adaptable to the different styles of learners.

My project partner and I chose a middle elementary novel study to adapt for a student in grade three who has difficulty sharing his ideas in writing, most likely due to problems with fine motor skills and limited experience (most often having teachers scribe for him). We were able to scan the book in order to have the program read the book aloud to him at a speed appropriate for him (he seems to be able to follow along well when a book is read aloud, but often looses interest quickly), and were able to easily insert the novel study activities at the appropriate places in the novel as bubble notes (multiple choice questions, short answer typed responses with word recognition support from the uploaded novel vocabulary, matching activities) as well as voice recorded responses, and text note instructions for pencil and paper drawing activities. The different modes of delivery of the activity instructions, the use of novel means of sharing his ideas, as well as learning how to use the program on the computer (equipment he enjoys using) and keeping up with the class, are likely to make this a successful use of the program in his case. Some issues with the scanning (being our first time using it) were in editing the zones to be read when the program picked up page numbers and some areas of pictures as text. This was a time consuming process, especially if we had already created bubble notes on the page before zone-editing (which it doesn’t let you do.) While the novel study did take some time to set up, it shows promise as something the teacher can easily adjust and adapt to many students over a few years of use, and can be shared among teachers for students of similar reading levels, and therefore worth the extra planning time.
It will be interesting to see how the other students in the class used the same Kurzweil options with their assessment activities.