Communicating with Technology:

Using technology in a classroom will motivate learning among students, especially for pre-k students. Technology is a great tool that will capture every student attention in the classroom. One of the most beneficial sources of education in technology are the iPads or tablets.  The iPads help educators to collaborate with students. I am pretty sure that we will have classrooms full of tablets in the near future, once school districts realize the tremendous help and contribution that tablets can provide to our students. 

The students these days need little support on how to use equipment, it’s surprising how 4 years old kids know how to use an smart phone and to navigate an ipad. Some students might have ipads at home some we can take advantage of the student prior knowledge.  Students absorb what you teach them using technology because they are more willing to learn using technology they don’t get bored. Using technology in a daily basis will address learning goals equally or even more effectively than traditional classroom materials.

Regardless of what subject and level you teach, there is an app for it. For instance, Phone for Kids, Phone for Kids transforms your iPhone/iPad to a complete Child Safe Phone environment. With this app they will find touch sensitive menus with no less than 24 unique educational games and activity design to interact, entertain and teach. Phone for kids includes easy to digest educational materials about: Colors, Numbers, Letters, Shapes, Directions, Days of the week, Animals, Drawings and much more. The perfect way to use your iPhone/iPad/iPod-Touch as a complete learning and playing experience for your students.

Since I chose a chapter that deals with communication with technology I found this fantastic app about assistive communication.  Proloque2Go is one of the most known apps on the ipad that does a really good job, it is not cheap, but you get what you pay for.  This is an app that is worth paying because it comes full-featured with augmentative and alternative communication solution for autistic children who have problems speaking.  The setup is very simple and it gives you natural sound text-to-speech voices, very high-resolution symbols, conjugations and a vocabulary of over 7,000 items. 

Another app that will help in the classroom is iCommunicate that it is a little bit more affordable and does a really good job to create pictures, flashcards, storyboards, routines, visual schedules and record custom audio in any language. This app comes already with thousand pictures. This app will definitely help educators to aid students in their communication skills.