Intern Year: Fall 2013: Week 9

          This Thursday and Friday, I was given the privilege of attending the West Virginia State CEC Conference.  It was such a great experience to be a part of a community of special education educators and to learn from them.  In the future, I hope to become an active member of the CEC state chapter to help myself develop professionally and learn from my peers.  The sessions that I attended were very useful and informative to me as a student teacher.  The first session that I attended was on different apps to use with students on ipads and macs.  The special education room that I am in now has three ipads available for the students to use.  Most of the apps dealt with giving students the opportunity to express themselves without using paper and pencil.  The majority of the apps focused on text to speech, which I had never seen used before on the ipad.  The text to speech allows the student to highlight text or passage and have it read to them.  There were also programs used where you can download free books for students to use with the text to speech.  I feel this will be very beneficial for me to use with my students who are struggling readers.  Also, I plan to use this in my action research with my student who is below level in reading.  I feel it would benefit him to allow him to experience spoken and written language together independently and for it to model how to read aloud properly. 

            The next session focused again on different apps and programs to use as a researcher.  In most cases, we focus on the different programs to assist our students.  However, I have never thought about what programs could assist me while I am researching.  The speaker demonstrated different programs to use on the computer and internet to help us organize our research articles.  The programs would have been so beneficial to me throughout the Benedum Program with all of the research and articles I have worked with.  I now plan to use these great tools in the future to help myself develop as an educator and researcher and to help my students develop their abilities!

          The next session I attended was focused on Policy 4373 in regards to restraining.  It was a very informational session that provided me with information that will be valuable to me as a special educator.  There are many times when teachers in general have to restrain a student, and restraining can be something as simple as stopping them from running away.   This session helped me to make sense of the logistical aspects of restraining and how important it is to be aware of the policies that are in effect to help protect myself and my students.