Universal Access

Since I have begun teaching 7 years ago, I have taken classes that covered many different topics and ideas, especially those regarding varying teaching styles. Brain Compatible Strategies for Teaching Math, Differentiated Instruction, and Universal Access. While these topics are all different, they do have an underlying theme. I believe that theme is that we teachers have different kinds of students. Students from different socioeconomic backgrounds, students from different family make-ups, students with different learning styles and students with different attitudes toward school. Teachers have a very difficult task, teaching to this many different students. No one said it would be easy and many teachers, that I’ve seen are sometimes unwilling to try different approaches. But that is what we signed up for and that is what we need to do.
I have 21 students in my Introduction to Algebra class, 11 of which have IEPs. I do have a second teacher with me, but even with this small number of students, there are many different kinds of learners in this class. Technology has helped me in my attempt to reach these students. One use of technology that I use frequently is http://www.funbrain.com/math/index.html. This is a very basic website that I use to practice simple arithmetic facts. The beauty of the site is that in the same baseball game, students can change the difficulty level and the amount of hints and clues. My very basic students can have the same amount of success as my more developed students.
I also came across an article that shows how technology can give universal access to information that most of us take for granted. One of the biggest drawbacks that blind people have when using the Internet is not the words, many programs can read the text aloud to their users, but the images. In order to solve this problem, web creators need to label millions of images. Asking people to spend their time doing this would become very boring, very fast. Professors at Carnegie Mellon have developed a way to entice people to help. They have created the ESP game. Two visitors to www.espgame.org are matched up and shown a random image from the Internet and then they are asked to label the image. Partners are not allowed to communicate and are given words that they are not allowed to use, taboo words. When the partners give the same word, points are awarded. The labels are used to help programmers and web sites describe the images on their site. Eventually, the labels given by the humans will be used to develop computers to come up with common-sense judgments or descriptions.