SPED 310 Week 10

This week was a really fun week and I was able to apply a lot of what we learned to how I can use it as an educator. We learned about differentiated instruction, and we applied it by teaching. We also had a lesson on Orthopedic Impairments and Traumatic Brain Injuries, as well as giving a presentation on Cognitive Impairments.
When we learned about differentiated instruction we were able to see different teaching styles there are and the things we liked and didn't like about each of them. As we chose a strategy to use we were able to now see how effective they were in our lessons. For my group we chose to teach another group how to make snowflakes. For our teaching strategy we had one teacher who was the head of the lesson, and we combined with each other by having two assistant teachers and one observing teacher. By doing this we were able to assist those who didn't understand the material and also have an observing giving us feed back at the end. I really liked this strategy and it was effective for us because we had a strong lead teacher who was prepared, and we were prepared to assist. We were then taught how to throw pizza dough with towels and we were taught with a visual video and also with assistant teachers. We really liked learning this as a group.
The presentation on Orthopedic impairments and Traumatic Brain Injuries really opened my mind to all of the different kinds there are of each. They can be genetic and acquired and it is important for us to see how this fits into IDEA to see the services we may be able to provide for these students. I wish this would have been discussed more in the presentation, but overall it raised my awareness of the conditions.
For the final day this week I along with my group gave a presentation on Cognitive Impairments. It was fun to see our progression in the learning process as we learned so much about many different kinds of Cognitive Impairments as well as they stigmas and myths we thought. We were able to see how society has evolved in their thoughts about cognitive impairments as well as expand our knowledge of how Cognitive Impairment itself is not a syndrome, but how it is coupled with other syndromes and disabilities. What I liked were the teaching strategies we were able to find in our research so that we can implement them in our classroom.
The resource most helpful to me this week was the wonderful internet. I was able to find so many amazing sites for our presentation and great information for teachers and parents.