Carol Anne McGuire, Teacher, Imperial Elementary, Orange Unified School District.
It’s 2:12 at MacWorld, the day of the K12 Symposium. Carol Anne McGuire is showing a video that was produced by here students. Her students are blind. This is incredible. They plan, write their scripts in braille, and make it happen. Carol Anne said something very important before the video. She said, “Never underestimate what your students can accomplish?”
She’s great. Carol Anne is talking about some of the universal access options of Mac OS. Teachers make great presenters. The energy and enthusiasm comes group. It’s contagious.
Her students do iChat sessions each week with classes around the world. In Russia, students with disabilities are taken out of the school’s and put back in the home. Her students have had iChat conferences with government official in that country, talking about what they have accomplished in their classes.
Speech recognition is pretty cool. It’s been a long time since I played with speech control, and it’s evidently gotten a lot better. Carol Anne showed a video produced by her daughter, demonstrating how to use voice control.
Wow! She has a student with speech problems. He has started working with his computer, to get it to understand his speech. He is working harder to accomplish this than he ever worked on traditional speech activities. He no longer needs a special teacher coming in.
She is now showing a video of a blind 2nd grader, tutoring us on how to set up voice over. My mouth is hanging open. This seven year old child, who obviously can’t see, is compellingly teaching us how to operate a computer. This is amazing, amazing, amazing.
This made me smile. Thanks Dave, reminds me that technology is not all evil.
Dave,
Bloody hell! This really grabbed me! Excuse my French, but this is absolutely far out!
Actually, I’ve just got home from a 6-hour symposium for (Japanese) JHS and SHS teachers of English. The key-note speaker was an energetic and charismatic man who has been on national television several times. I will blog about his presentation later, as he hit on a few core skills or concepts that are valid for teaching generally, not just EFL. But he kept including in his presentation, questions and statements and contributions made by his students, and he kept repeating, like a leitmotif, “my students are GREAT! YOUR students are great! They can all do this!”