Day 4, July 7

Today's class was entertaining. I did two webinars in the ONLINE Elluminate Session. The first one was Apps in Action for Multiple disabilities. This webinar really confirmed the benefits of the iPhone or iPod touch. It's portability and easiness to use are definite selling features. Some of the built in accessibility options were amazing to me. I had no idea that Voice Over and Zoom were built-in features in my iPhone!! Wow!

Many of the Apps for disabilities looked awesome. I was especially impressed with Dragon Dictation. VBookZ also looked very user friendly and beneficial. It was especially great seeing the demonstartions and case studies of students who were truly benefiting from the Apps! Because I work with children in the Kindergarten to grade 3 school system, I was especially interested in the Reading A-Z App and will definitely be downloading it to my iPhone.

Apps for Early Learning were also of great interest to me. Montessori Puzzles, StarFall and Kid Art all looked like very useful, innovative tools to assist children in learning. Apps for Visual Impairment peaked my interest as well because I have a student in my school in grade 2 who's visually impaired. He uses Zoom Text and various amplifying devices to assist him with his daily activities.  I was impressed with the Big Magnifying App and had already downloaded it yesterday during my seach for Apps for reluctant readers,with that particular student in mind.

My second webinar was on Apps in Action for Reluctant Readers. As mentioned previously, VBookZ was exciting to see. I was especially impressed with the text to speech, highlighting and changing size of text and font features in this app. I can think of so many student who would benefit greatly from this App. Yesterday we searched for Apps for Reluctant Readers and found many for Primary age students.

Overall, I found the webinars to be very beneficial and interesting. Thank you for making them available to us! :)