On the whole, my impression of Kurzweil is great- it does have a lot of fantastic tools for students of any level. It look a lot of playing around to navigate my way around finding/using certain tools, but I can certainly see how- once a student learns how to use it- it could help with some of the most common hurdles our students face when trying to access and understand material. While I was TOC-ing last week, I asked one of the Special Ed teachers at my school if Kurzweil was accessible on many school computers- and how many students used it. As I sort of expected, he said that they only have Kurzweil on a few computers because of a few key factors: the cost of buying it, the training of staff on how to use it, and then the training of students. He said that it's certainly a great idea in theory, but not always feasible in terms of budget and the time it takes to train and make it a simple yet successful tool. This is the story for so many fantastic tools that we would love to supply to students- but is just not always possible.
He said that, rather than Kurzweil- the Google Chrome extensions are much easier to access and use, so that is what he uses with students. I was then happy to see that we were discussing them in the class webinar this week, as they seem like a great (and free) tool that any student can easily access and learn how to use. Hooray for free tools! :)
PS. My use of song for the slideshow was partly because I was thinking of songs with "universe" in the title (keeping with the theme of UDL), partly because I wanted a mellow tune in the background, and purely because any form of a Beatles song is always wonderful.
No comments:
Post a Comment