ILP 2: EME2040

ILP 2: Digitech

Some of the assignments we are required to complete in Educational Technology are called “independent learning projects,” or ILP’s for short. Over the course of the semester, students are asked to complete two ILP’s, choosing from the options of ‘participation,’ ‘design,’ and ‘tech tool box.’ The teacher also offered the option of visiting the Digitech event held in the Innovation Hub and writing about it and some of the items on display. I chose to visit the Innovation Hub and experience Digitech.

Digitech is an event held by FSU which features an exhibition where students and faculty can come and experience many different kinds of technological tools. According to the Digitech website, this year was its eighth year of exhibiting new and exciting technologies. Today, when I visited the event, I saw a lot of very different types of technological tools. Some were classroom friendly, others had very different purposes, but they all were aimed at creating innovation and ease in life’s many activities. When I walked into the Innovation Hub, I was immediately drawn to a unique display. I saw a table lined with iPads that were all opened up to different applications. This display was run by a woman in the master’s program in the school of communication disorders and disabilities. The woman running the table explained to me that the iPads were each displaying apps to help with different types of communication disorders. She showed me one application that helped children communicate and create sentences by following their head movements. This piece of technology was very interesting because of how receptive it could be. Despite how cool it seemed, one drawback to it was the lack of options it provided on the screen. iPad screens are already so limited in size that the amount of types of words and requests that could fit on the screen was constrained. The next application this woman showed me was another iPad that had similar words and features on the screen. This application, however, differed from the other because it was programed to recognize eye movements and display words and sentences from those movements on the screen. 

Figure 1: This is the iPad which read eye movements to create sentences. 

This app was designed for people whose disabilities render them completely immobile.  This app dealt with the same drawbacks as the other one because the iPad only offers so many options on the screen at once. However, if you look at Figure 1, you can see there is an option on the left-hand side of the screen to change conversation topics which offers more flexibility in conveying information.

Digitech was an interesting experience. I enjoyed the many different technologies I saw, and I was especially impressed by the display I initially interacted with. I went into the experience thinking I was just doing work for a class, and left feeling like I had learned something new, interesting, and useful. As a teacher, I will never know what kinds of students will walk into my classrooms until I actually meet them. Experiencing technologies like these makes me feel more prepared to handle and educate any type of student- disabled or not.