2012.05.31+SPED+487+Notes

Guest: Robin Kahn
Robin is a special education teacher in an elementary DI classroom.

Classroom Research - the Story of the Cargo Cult
Richard Feynman, a Nobel-winning physicist, called most educational research "Cargo Cult Science", because it looks like science, and goes through the motions of real research, but doesn't have the drive of real science - to figure out how things really work. Most classroom research, especially for curriculum and special education products that are advertised as "research-based", is funded by curriculum vendors and publishers. The unstated goal of the "research" is to show a "significant" positive outcome using the product in the classroom. As you can imagine, there are many uncontrolled variables in a classroom that make the results highly suspect. [|Classroom Research and Cargo Cults] [|The Hawthorne Effect] [|The Placebo Effect]

Action Research
The problem with Lewin's Process of Change (Unfreezing, Changing, Refreezing) [|Action Research] [|Action Pseudo-Research] [|Teacher & Action Research]

Near-Future Assistive Technology - Real Soon Now
[|Windows 8] is coming, and it uses touchscreen/touchpad gestures. Excellent accessibility features built-in, including speech-to-text for dictation and commands, and an on-screen keyboard with word-prediction.

Gesture interfaces are going to be a Big Deal. [|Leap] is a new technology with a lot of potential. [|Kinect for Windows] works at shorter distances than the Xbox Kinect, and it can track your face and facial expressions. [|Microsoft Kinect for Education] Video Games Help Autistic Students

Transition and Funding
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