One area of technology usage that is really important to consider is Assistive Technology. As educators we need to become familiar with technology that is available that can help our students with learning and communicating. With this lesson, you'll have an opportunity to read an overview of assistive technology in the format of questions and answers and then you'll take a look at resources that are available to us here in Hawaii.

Try this:

1. Go to Bridge to Independence (http://www.wistech.org/bridge/contents.html) and read through the questions, answers, tips and case studies as an introduction to assistive technology.
2. Now visit the NCIP (National Center for Improving Practice) site (http://www2.edc.org/NCIP/library/toc.htm). You'll find links on this site to rich pages describing how teachers use assistive tech (video and captioning, multimedia, organizing tools, portable tools, tech in early childhood education, tech for students who are visually impaired, telecommunications, and word prediction) in their classrooms. Each link takes you to Profiles, General information, Practice and Research. Choose the topics that you are interested in learning about and enjoy the information.
3. Next spring, the DOE will be sponsoring a series of broadcasts on Assistive Technology. Visit their Assistive Technology website (http://www.atrc.org/tv/) for a preview of what will be broadcast. This will be offered as a class, however the broadcasts will be on public access tv so you can watch the ones that are of interest to you. Be sure to check out their resource pages as they reflect resources that are currently available to us within the DOE.

In addition to considering the use of assistive technology in the classroom, we also need to be aware of access issues with the web pages that we are creating for students and families to use. You may remember us referring to the need to make our web pages ADA compliant. We haven't discussed this in any depth up to this point in time because you are just beginning to get a handle on your web skills. However, as you become more experienced with web design, you will need to be sure to try to make your web pages ADA compliant.

The websites listed below outline guidelines to consider when creating web pages as well as links to sites that will check your pages for compliancy. Check out these sites to begin to develop an understanding of the guidelines. Since you are fairly new to web design, these guidelines may not make much sense. As you gain more experience with creating web pages, they'll start to make more sense. To begin with, one guideline that you'll want to be sure to observe is how you deal with graphics. Each graphic you put on your site needs to have an alt tag. This is text that loads before the graphic that describes the graphic. If you go to the help menus in whatever web editing program you are using, you should be able to find directions for how to put in alt tags. Here's a screen shot from Claris HomePage showing where to place the alt tag.

Double click on your image and then where it says Alt label: you can type in a description of what the graphic represents. This text will show while your graphic is loading or if your graphic is turned off.

The websites below will take you to the guidelines and to some tips for creating ADA compliant websites. Read through these to see what you are expected to learn to do in order to be compliant. Keep in mind that you are learning to create websites and that it will take time and practice to learn to implement the guidelines. For your T3 sites, the first guideline that we will expect to see you implement is putting alt tags on all your graphics.

1. http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/#Guidelines
2. http://www.stack.nl/htmlhelp/design/accessibility/tips.html

There is no assignment for this lesson other than to read through all the information that is given above and to go to the sites that have been identified for you to try out or to read through. More Assistive Technology resources have been listed on the Resource page.