Technology
I believe that technology is a formidable tool for providing access points to the general education curriculum. The use of assistive and general educational technologies allows students with special needs to engage with class content in a more meaningful way. While working with students in a K-5 resource room, I employed technology as one of my primary methods of differentiation. Technology-based interventions like Letter School and Splash Math provided students important practice with academic skills in a discrete trial format. These interventions also provided a record of student progress toward learning goals, in addition to providing them immediate affirmative feedback.
I use speech-to-text technology and word processing software as a tool for helping students with fine-motor or language needs shift their cognitive load from producing a final product to analyzing lesson materials and building their knowledge of a subject. The availability of technology relieved my students of physical and cognitive obstacles to their learning, allowing and empowering them to build stamina as readers, writers, and mathematicians.
I believe that technology provides students with special needs greater opportunities in the general education environment. The use of assistive communication devices like ProLoQuo allow non-verbal students to advocate for themselves and connect with their peers. Furthermore, the use of technology to support students’ social-emotional needs helps increase positive peer relationships and aid students in the general education environment. By providing students with support, not only in their academic needs, but their emotional needs as well, technology can be a powerful tool to support students across the school environment.
In the future, I plan to use technology to further support the whole-child development of my student’s needs so that they are fully able to participate in general and special education setting.
Lesson Plan
In this lesson plan, my student completes a social-emotional simulation on ZooU, by Centervention. Using a multiple choice format, this student practices regulating emotions and using pro-social behaviors in a low-risk environment. This use of technology allows the student to explore the consequences of behavior in a safe space before attempting to apply new social-emotional skills among her peers.
Artifacts
Splash Math
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I use programs like Splash Math to provide students with opportunities to reinforce concepts they are working on in the resource room and the general education classroom. For many of my students who have math goals, the use of Splash Math helps them build fact fluency through a variety of different computation and word problems.
The students also receive immediate feedback from the program if they perform a computation wrong, and they are prompted to try again. The use of this in my classroom has been incredibly beneficial in allowing me to reinforce important concepts and track student progress through the software of the program.
Flocabulary
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The videos on Flocabulary and the supplemental vocabulary assignments on the website are excellent supplements to my reading and math curriculum. When introducing or reviewing content, I will show students a Flocabulary video to provide a musical anchor for their knowledge. Over the course of a Flocabulary lesson, I pause the video to review what the students have learned thus far and to engage them in a discussion of a new topic, such as story elements.
Then, after re-watching the video, I allow my students to engage in active practice with the vocabulary terms by writing of drawing a definition of each new term as this image shows. By differentiating the method in which my students expand their vocabulary they are able to engage with new terms and build a visual cue they can reference in later instruction.
Finally, in order to review this concept, I use previously watched Flocabulary videos to review concepts and engage in a critical discussion over the course of an instructional unit. My students respond very positively to the Flocabulary videos and are able to use the lyrics of the songs to support their use of new vocabulary in classwork.
ZooU
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This online simulation is a tool that I use to help students build their social-emotional intelligence. The website teaches students about six important character traits that help students succeed in at school: empathy, social initiation, impulse control, communication, emotion regulation, and cooperation. Each character trait has six simulations that students use to explore how different prosocial behaviors influence interactions with teachers and peers.
In the low-risk environment of this simulation, my students are able to practice using different social skills and self-regulation techniques to create positive relationships with others. In addition, using baseline data from a training module, I am able to monitor my students’ progress in building these social skills using a weekly report sent to me regarding their progress using each character trait. From this foundation, I build social-skills lessons that provide my students with specific behavior interventions and lessons that help them apply the targeted character traits to the general education environment.
