Then, when they practice these flash cards, they press the sound button to see if they read the word correctly, and it reads the word to them in their own voice. I had my students enter customized lists of the specific high-frequency words they needed to work on, and they recorded their own voices reading the words. Teachers may choose from a pre-loaded library of hundreds of word patterns or create a customized list of words for students. Some lessons that I made for a struggling reader included, “Point to the words that rhyme with red.” Or, for another student who had trouble identifying high-frequency words, I made a lesson with questions like, “Choose the word that says ‘and,'” where the student chose between two or three words.Īnother fabulous (and free) app for phonics and working with word patterns is Phonics Genius. The teacher may choose for the task to ask the student anything-you can record your own voice with any question you choose. There can be more than one correct answer. Then, the teacher makes custom lessons with as few or as many tasks as he or she desires, and each task may have one choice or multiple choices. The app itself is free and comes with a series of libraries that you can purchase (most $2.99 or under): anything from sight word libraries, body parts, food, shapes, colors, and actions words. This app can be whatever you want it to be. This is a multipurpose app that can make lessons for very low-functioning kids who need help identifying colors or basic everyday objects it is an app to learn sight words, an app to practice phonemic awareness skills, to practice math facts, or to categorize objects. They’re just to play with.” This is a terrible misunderstanding. They either go way too over the kids’ heads or they’re too low or they’re not well made. But when you first think about educational apps, you likely immediately have the same thought I did: “Nah, those apps are probably like a lot of free educational websites and games. It goes without saying that iPads are cool, and fun to play with. This was the moment of the assistive technology Big Bang-that enlightening moment at our charter school where the special education department’s framework of instruction began to re-work, re-think and re-imagine all the strategies and tools that AT would give us and how it would allow our students to reach higher potential. She also demo-ed a word processor that has a text-predict feature-eliminating the painful step of physically writing or spelling words for kids who suffer from reading and learning disabilities like dyslexia and dysgraphia. She also recommended some lower-tech items like special paper to use for math computations and putting spaces between words in writing. iPads came up the consultant gave us what looked like a 10,000-pound encyclopedia of iPad apps for education: everything from an app to help motivate kids with toilet-training to augmentative communication device apps to sight word and math flash card apps. In a few weeks, this consultant came to meet with each of the special education teachers one-on-one with a goal of ultimately guiding us to some technology that would be most appropriate for our kids. Assistive technology, AT in jargon, refers to any technology or supportive device that helps enable students: something as small as a pencil grip or as fancy as an iPad. With determination, she sought out an assistive technology consultant to help us with using more technology in our classroom. We were wimpy about asking the school to purchase iPads, afraid that the rest of the staff would think we were sitting in first class and leaving them behind in coach. At the end of this meeting, iPads were in the special education budget, and I was a believer.Ī few months down the road, in August, we were all pumped up and energized from a summer break and a few weeks of professional development before school-but we were iPad-less. At the meeting, I felt that I had been all but stoned by my fellow special education teachers who were evangelical about iPads. I was with Susan I wasn’t sure what good an iPad would be in the classroom other than a way for kids (and teachers) to play, get off task, and inevitably get in trouble. “I need an iPad, too!” She quickly realized my colleagues were not fooling, not even a little they were serious about iPads. Someone turned to Susan and whispered, “We need iPads.” She brushed it off. After the laughter subsided, we answered her in earnest. “A big raise,” a couple of us shouted, half-kidding. Advocacy Back Toolkit for Parents, Educators and StudentsĪt the end of last school year, my special education coordinator, Susan, asked my colleagues and me what we wanted for the 2011–2012 school year.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |