This weeks readings, Using Flexible Technology to Meet the Needs of Diverse Learners: What Teachers Can Do by Lisa Wahl and Julie Duffield and Chapter 2 Diverse Teaching Strategies for Diverse Learners by Marietta Saravia-Shore, both addressed the importance of teaching using modern day best practices to meet the needs of a diverse student body. Because my students are so young, some of the suggestions in both articles would not be appropriate do to their developmental and physical age, but many of the tips were very helpful.
In the article by Lisa Wahl and Julie Duffield the authors spent a great deal of time outline the importance of using technology effectively in classroom settings to better differentiate instruction and encourage student performance and learning. In my classroom I use a number of technologies to accomplish this same task including a SmartBoard that I use daily for hands on activities and presentations to assist students in not only cognitive growth, but in the development of fine and gross motor skills as well. Because my students are so short we have a platform built for them to reach the board which is a great way for them to practice their gross motor stair climbing skills and stretching to reach and move images or text. Using the pens or their fingers to trace lines, write on the board, or manipulate images also helps to encourage fine motor skills and adds interest to sometimes mundane activities. I also use Board Maker and Symbol Stix, two computer programs that allows me to generate picture symbols to assist with communication for my nonverbal students, serve as visual cues for my visual learners, and to accompany text to assist in literacy development. We also recently acquired new iPads for the classroom which I intend to use once I have done some more research on educational apps
One thing that I took from the article by Wahl and Duffield is that text to speech can be a great tool to assist early readers and make text more accessible. While none of my students are actually "reading" at this time, we are working on letter recognition skills and I expose them to text daily during read alouds, quiet reading time, and sentence strip activities accompanied with picture symbols. One draw back to the current method that I use to expose students to text is that most of the activities with text requires a teacher to guide students by either reading the text to them or by providing verbal prompts to attend to the picture symbols. The program that I currently use for the majority of my text is called Unique and while it does have a text to speech feature, the voice is so robotic that my students (many of whom struggle with language themselves) have difficulty understanding what the speaker is saying. I would love for the creators of Unique to create or utilize a more natural sounding text to speech program so that my young students could better benefit from reading independently. One thing that I do use currently to provide some sort of text to speech for my students is youtube videos of read alouds that follow along with text, audiobooks, and recordings of my own voice.
In the article by Marietta Saravia-Shore, many different teaching techniques are given to help lessen the achievement gap. Most of the article touches on the topic of educating minority or ESL students, but I believe that the majority of the tips would fit for special education students as well. Marietta talks about how we must embrace diversity, not segregate, and hold all students to high expectations. These are all things that I firmly believe are important to practice as a special educator as well. Because I have an inclusive classroom my students are integrated either directly into the general education classroom, or are integrated by having general education students in our classroom daily. I teach the same material but with differentiated tasks and supports to all of my students including my general education students for that day, and all students are expected to complete their work. My students are beginning to learn not only about letted and numbers, they are also learning that everyone is different and has different needs. They learn that "fair" does not mean everyone gets the same thing, but instead means that everyone gets what they need to succeed. This practice and belief is at the heart of the article by Marietta and is illustrated through her numerous tips on how to run a successful classroom to reach diverse learners.