CED 533 Class 2

It's all starting to come back to me! The html code writing that I did in high school programming class is beginning to become clear again. I have to say that I really enjoy Dreamweaver much more than actually writing the code however. Why go through the frustration of trying to write the code if Dreamweaver will do it without a lot of the frustration?
During last week's lecture, I developed a better appreciation for the true power that today's computers hold. I remember the Apple IIe's in my second grade classroom with the huge floppy disks and the "smooth" animations on the orange or green and black screens. I thought we had it made! It's amazing how far we have come in about 15 years. I wish that our students today could truly understand the impact of how far we have come. My students get frustrated when a website takes longer than 15 seconds to load or when a screen reader pronounces a word with a weird articulation. We really have come a long way!
Speaking of my students, I felt like I had a little bit of insight into their learning challenges this week. My attention was a little limited last week during class. About 30 minutes into the lecture, when CSS and other coding was being discussed, I had this "I have no idea what we're talking about" moment. For a few minutes, I sat there thinking that this is way above my head and I'll never be able to wrap my mind around it. Having a little better problem solving skills than the majority of my students, I was able to refocus and develop a little bit of an understanding of what we were learning about. Later in the lab, I felt much more confident with what was discussed. Just goes to show what a hands-on learner I am! In retrospect, it helped me to greater understand a challenging situation for my students the next day. As we were in the middle of a lesson on graphing, I caught that deer in the headlights look (which I had the night before) from several of my students. While I often get this look, I had a greater understanding for how they felt! Funny how a lesson which was totally unrelated to anything I would ever teach to first and second graders with learning disabilities would help me to understand them just a little better!