Getting our MITS on Technology

I met with my general ed teachers again. What a wonderful team we have!! Their enthusiasm is contagious. I had the Ultra Lab from http://www.writerlearning.com/ sent to their school so they could have ownership of the technology. We spent a half hour playing with the writers yesterday. You would have thought it was Christmas the way they smiled when we tore into the boxes. They kept commenting on how excited the students would be to use them! Imagine that...students wanting to use special ed technology in class...I've had so many students with special needs not want to use an Alphasmart or some other type of device because they didn't want to look different than their peers. Now that we are letting all students in the class use the Writers the students with special needs are going to stand out as being different. I realize that I'm in a unique position of having money to be able to back up what I'm preaching but I'm not going to apologize for it! We are going to ride this wave while we have it!! Some of the options that the Writer has built in are: Writing prompts (40+ story starters that support students with ideas for what to right about), Score (after typing text, press the score button and get a grade level score for your text) and Adjective builder (press Alt-A to choose from categories of adjectives to add to your text). The teachers are already thinking of ways they can use them with the projects they will working on in January. The students and staff are going to have a great time writing with the Writers!