EDUC 890-994
Advanced Internship in Education
George Mason University
Summer 2009
EDUC 890-994
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As
I approached the end of the course work for my PhD, the Doctoral internship
became a primary focus. It began with an application
outlining the relevance of the chosen experience. Although many opportunities
were present, a consistent interest in the effects of using assistive
technology to help students develop writing skills and compensate for deficits
such as severe spelling difficulties and dysgraphia weighed heavily on the
decision to work in the CompuWrite Camp at
The
experience added to my repertoire of working with teachers as they attempt to
integrate assistive technology into their writing program. Some possible
areas of interest and future research questions emerged, including
investigating;
Two features of interest come to light. Two students’ great difficulty with typing and spelling lead to a great deal of off task behavior and difficulty with motivation. The younger student was enamored with using pictures paired with text for writing. When directed to write with pencil and paper she often complained, asked for water, wanted a snack, and became agitated and would only write a few words. Her attention to task increased tremendously and her well defined sense of story emerged when she brainstormed with an adult to create a pallet of words she had generated using picture to text software.
. 
The older student found working with Dragon
NaturallySpeaking, dictation software, as a possible solution to his advanced
verbal skills that were paired with very poor spelling and writing skills.
Noticing
that lack of experience with software programs combined with software programs
that did not work as expected reduced teachers’ tendencies to encourage
students to use software programs that could greatly enhance student writing
products. Whereas, generally the students enjoyed using technology, frustration
with using a software program that lacked consistency and stability was another
situation where software programs were abandoned. Difficulty with
different procedures for saving products due to software such as Deep-Freeze
cause the loss of data and great frustration with teachers and students.
Whereas
the overall experience was positive, definite changes could be made to enhance
next year's camp. Some of those changes would be the use of the actual
room and computers during training and an extra day of access to the actual
computers to create products and prepare for students would help teachers
troubleshoot difficulties before students arrived. Teachers would have the
chance to learn to save products properly to avoid losing data. Extra training
would also enable teachers to become more familiar with the software and to
have time to work out problems together. Another possible change would be to
ensure the most updated versions of software were available and tested for the
compatibility with other software programs such as Word. The difficulty with
Co-Writer freezing when used with Word 2007 meant that a very effective for
prediction software was abandoned quickly.
The products submitted for the
internship were a log
of hours, a reflection
paper, as well as other products produced such as a parent
outline for assistive technology information, a list of software
features and websites for information for the teachers, and a PowerPoint
presentation created to illustrate the camp experience.