Ch 4: Emerging and Assistive Technologies and the Future

Chapter four of Bitter and Legacy's book, Using Technology in the Classroom, explains how quickly technology is changing and developing as assistive tools.  Computers are here to stay and changing rapidly to the point of outdating themselves in a matter of a few years.  Computers are getting more compact yet memory capacity is increasing.  Computers prices are decreasing while computer usages are increasing.  Break through technology not only has enhanced the computer preferences but also their assistive capability.  Emerging assistive technology can assist four types of impairments; hearing, speech, vision, and cognitive.  

Ch 14-15 Producing and Presenting: Assessing and Evaluating

Chapter 14 of the text Using Technology in the Classroom, Bitter and Legacy discuss the use of technology as a tool for creating multi-media products for presentation.  The text not only describes types of media such as power point, graphics, animation, and digital storytelling, but it also details characters of each media.  For instance, when the authors discuss power point, it also details how to create an affective power point  by pointing out where to put text, graphics, and what kind of font to use.

While chapter 14 discusses the use of technology for the student, chapter 15 switches to the topic of uses of technology by the teachers.  Technology can help educators make more accurate assessments and evaluations.  Assessing and evaluating are often used interchangeable but they are quite different.  Assessments are a collection of student products that show student capability where as evaluation is the judgement made from numeral assessments.  Technology can aid teachers in creating reliable assessment tools and can aid in creating evaluation tools enhancing more accurate record keeping.