2008 a busy busy year

This year Halinda has grown and expanded it's use of Interactive Whiteboard technologies. Now with IWBs in a majority of classes the sharing of lesson delivery techniques and familiarity with the tool has allowed some inventive uses of the medium for Quality Teaching.

Special school students are quite often visual learners and this predilection finds the IWB an especially useful and adaptable vehical for connecting with the communication needs and specific abilities of students.

The Special school environment needs to be a highly responsive setting where priorities for individuals are tailored and reviewed constantly. It must also be a consistent mass practice zone that allows students the full benefit of cognitive routines that can be applied across various settings. The IWB has proven a reliable and adaptable addition for the skilled Special Ed teacher.

In 2009 our classrooms will increase their alignment with at least three more IWBs for the school.

Halinda Stepping Up: Lessons for Todays Child

The classroom is a changing place. Gone are the days of "chalk and talk", alone, as lesson delivery. Long gone. Well provisioned classrooms are places where students can step up the front of the classroom and learn actively ... interactively. If you step into a classroom where the teacher and student have an IWB you have just as much chance of seeing students using technology as staff. The interactive nature of IWBs means the classroom can be decentred, students are not passive empty vessals for filling up with teacher wisdom but active learners, action researchers. Learning by interacting with learning materials.

Mixing Technologies

Augmenting student interactions with whiteboards by switch, felt-ended drum sticks and communication software can be valuable ways to further enhance access to learning material in the Special School setting or support unit. We have been trialling software that reads website out loud when students highlight text. The software can convert audio and does so with an Australian accent !

What is Halindatech ?

HALINDATECH blog is a site that records our journey along the technological superhighway. We are participating in an action research project that will better delineate the uses and the technicalities of Interactive Technology in our educational setting.

2008 A big year for Tech - Teaching and Learning

Learning and Teaching are changing.

The world that students with special needs live in is changing.

How do kids learn to deal with that changing world?

Have you ever been frustrated with a computer, phone service, ATM, mp3 player or website ?

Have you ever been frustrated with the pace of change ?

How do students with special needs fit into this world ?

How do carers make choices for their charges as they cope with this world?

These are questions that teachers in SSPs have to deal with increasingly. Teachers who forget this are possibly open to claims that they are asleep at the wheel, but possibly they have been left behind by thinly spread resources. There are many demands on all teachers in contemporary classrooms and to this is now added the pace of technological change. Peripherals, software, updates, databases, reporting, hardware problems, hardware costs, hardware repairs, time-share tech tools, networking, online resources, retraining and program familiarisation all need consideration within school even before a teacher sits down and begins to write a sequence of deliverable lessons.

These needs are compounded by the need to adapt curriculum content and physical access to technology to make it work.

In a connected world, disconnection and failure to change are accentuated.

Special need schools have to avoid being sleepy wards of yesteryear or cultural backwaters in order to do the best by the kids.

School staff do this job against this changing background whilst maintaining the basic skills and competancies that our kids need to get on in the world after school.