Back to School!

I hope that all the teachers out there had a great first week back at school! I am happy to report that both my students and I have made it through the first week of school despite malfunctioning lockers, the odd/even room wings and a transition from a small elementary school to a very large middle school.

ClassDojo

In my 2 previous blogs, I wrote about ClassDojo, a classroom management system that I would be trying in the classroom this year. As part of my classroom rules and expectations, I went over ClassDojo with my new students...and they loved it! After reviewing the attributes that I would be tracking (both positive and negative), I let each student pick their own avatar. End result? Students both vested in and excited by a behavior tracking system! Thank you ClassDojo!






Classroom Booksource

Another web20 tool that I recently began to use, but have not blogged about, is ClassroomBookSource.  As with most of my blog mentions, this is a free web20 app. Classroom BookSource is an online program that allows teachers to inventory, maintain and track their classroom libraries. Book titles can be input into the program via ISBN. For those who have access to a bar code reader, you can scan the titles into the program. Unfortunately I do not have one, so I entered the ISBN's manually. It took me approximately 10 hours over 3 days to input all my books, but it was time very well spent.

I now have my entire classroom library on line, in a system that allows my students to check out and return books electronically. It also allows me to track who has what. What I didn't anticipate about this was the reaction from my 6th grade students.

Once I showed them how they could check out books on my smartboard, at least 3 students immediately went back to my library and started looking for a book to borrow. I had underestimated the ability of this system to encourage literacy among my students. Needless to say, the hours I spent entering ISBN's was more than worth it, just to see the excitement in in their faces and hear it in their voices.

I will blog about more about this program next time, but please check it out! Is is FREE and EASY to use!


The Last Word

A friend of mine at school emailed me the following link last week, and it is just too good not to share. It is a blog entitled "You might be in the first week of school if..." 

Enjoy, and as always, let me know any comments, feedback, suggestions etc! I would love to hear from you.

The Freedom Stick - UDL at its best!

UDL Toolbelt
Last summer, my first blog post was about my favorite UDL tools developed by RSC, the Regional Support Center Scotland North and East. (Click here to read about RSC in my blog). 

Recently, I was thinking about revisiting the site to see if there have been any new developments to report. So it was providence that I spotted a tweet in my feed today about the Freedom Stick. When I clicked upon the link I was happily surprised to see that the Freedom Stick is the result of a beautiful partnership between RSC and MITs - Michigan's Integrated Technology Supports. The Freedom Stick has an unbelievable assortment of free UDL apps, and are too numerous to list here. Download it today to provide the best accessibility tools for your students. Accessibility = unlimited opportunity.

Symbaloo vs Educlipper update
I promised an update on my travails with Symbaloo and Educlipper, and already have a clear preference between the two visual bookmarking apps. The winner for me? Symbaloo because of its easy-to-use format. 

Feel free to comment, or if there are some UDL apps you would like to have tested, let me know!

ClassDojo

This fall, I will be a first year teacher...again. Up until now, with the exception of some students I only saw for math, I have taught 7th and 8th grade students exclusively.  I love 8th graders, I love 7th graders too. They get my humor, I get their humor, I understand their developmental capabilities as well as their mercurial, hormone-influenced temperaments. This fall, I will be moving down to the 6th grade, with a 6th grade special education caseload in addition to my specialized math classes. This is to be a one year gig: I will be looping back to the 7th grade after next year. 

After learning of this grade change, I started having nightmares about classrooms full of toddlers and misbehaving babies. It took me a night or two of these dreams to realize that I was a little stressed about my grade change and how developmentally different 6th graders are from their upper-middle school counterparts. While this doesn't sound like such a big change, it really is. 11 year olds versus 13 and 14 year olds. Incoming elementary students versus students ready for high school. I am used to getting students who have already been "broken in" with regards to the middle school environment. This fall, it is my job to get these students comfortable with that big step from elementary to middle school.

So...I have spent my summer trying to get myself and my classroom prepared for this big change.

Enter ClassDojo

First item on list:  find a workable method of enforcing, tracking and rewarding classroom behavior for my incoming students. Check! 

ClassDojo is an on-line behavior management tool for the classroom. According to its website, it improves "student behavior and engagement by awarding and recording real-time feedback". This is a FREE web tool. ClassDojo allows teachers to track both negative and positive behavior with a click, and provides feedback to students immediately. Instead of a check on the white board, ClassDojo allows you to itemize positive and negative behavior attributes, and print behavior report cards to promote student accountability. 

With ClassDojo, teachers can set up individual classes and enter their student rosters to track behavior on a student by student basis. Attributes can be customized within each class by the teacher, and are entered and tracked by date. To encourage student investment in this process, each student can select a cartoon "avatar" and be assigned a "secret code" to view their behavior over time. 

I set up my account and class lists in less than 15 minutes. Deciding on my positive and negative attribute trackers took more time as I personalized them according to class type. With a click, my class lists and attributes were saved and the Dojo was ready to go. 

Here is an example of some class avatars and class attributes:

To track behavior, open a class list, click on a student and click on the behavior attribute.

Students can gauge their behavior by their avatar:

I give the Dojo two very enthusiastic "thumbs up" for simplicity and ease. I will be using this daily in all my classes. Just a note: ClassDojo is free to teachers while it is in its Beta stage...so get in on the goodness while it lasts! 

Symbaloo versus EduClipper...so many choices

Yesterday while I was distracting myself with various webapps, I found many new (to me) websites to explore. I was busily adding new bookmarks to my Diigo, (which appeals to my OCD nature to organize things into a tidy and accessible "categories"), when I stumbled upon two similar webapps. Due to my inability to rein myself in, my Diigo is becoming more unwieldy by the day as more and more webapps are added out in cyberland, and as I add more and more of them to my library. Perhaps it was kismet that I found them...

A Melding of Visuals and Databases

As my students can attest, I love to organize things via color-coding. All notes pertaining to a certain unit might be purple, all reference sheets might be florescent, the red section is for quizzes and tests and on and on and on... I think that color might be the most under-utilized resource for special learners. Enter Symbaloo...

Symbaloo is a visual social bookmarking website. While Delicious and Diigo both are formatted like typical "database" websites, allowing you to assign each website multiple tags, across different searchable categories. Symbaloo does not have this capability per se. Symbaloo's "webmixes" are akin to Diigo or Delicious "tags", with out the cross-referencing capabilities. Symbaloo is all "look and click". As one who prefers visual formats, I think I might be able to live with this.

So...I set up both symbaloo and symbalooEDU accounts (why not? They are free!). Both apps have pre-set "web-mixes" that you can add to your account. Adding one of these mixes is easy, and symbaloo has step by step, simple to follow directions. I added the K-5 MathLinks to my pages with one click:

I also was able to set up my own "Math Toolz" webmix, creating my own tiles and bookmarks fairly easily. I could color code the tiles to represent different things; blue for apps, pink for worksheets etc..:

The only downside on symbaloo is that each webmix page limits me to 100 tile tags, but I think that is something I can live with too, given that I can create as many webmix pages as I want. I will give an update on my symbaloo travails in my next blog.

I have to say that I really liked the look of educlipper and the eduteacher website. Along with my social bookmarking "clipboards", I was able to set up a blog and a my profile easily. Here is the main page layout:

I like how the eduTeacher website allows you to access all the functions of the webapp via a "backpack". I didn't like how clunky it is to load, edit and update. Clipping and posting to my clipboards was also a cumbersome task, but once I loaded the educlipit toolbar button, the process went more smoothy. I am hoping that eduTeacher is working the kinks out of the program, because I do really like the setup (and it is free)!

How this can help special learners

This type of visual formatting is great for several types of learners: those who prefer "seeing" representations rather than words, students with print difficulties, students on the spectrum. Each student could create their own specialized "toolbox" and be able to access it from anywhere. Students with print issues could have buttons for text readers, web readers and speech to text apps or mp3 files. Students with written expression difficulties could have buttons for webspiration, their favorite organizational templates in document or pdf format, transition word lists and editing checklists. Endless accessibility = endless potential for our students.

Google Chome Goodies

Today my web wanderings took me to two interesting websites that are Google Chrome friendly and promote accessibility.

The first website I found was soundgecko by 121Cast, a free text-to-audio web service. This handy webapp allows you to have any web article text transcribed to audio format (mp3 and Google Chome extension). Since the audio file is in a friendly format, it can be played on just about any device. 

I decided to test it out myself, so I tagged an article from Yahoo and sent it away...and received it back within 5 minutes. I pressed the "listen" button and heard my article.
Here is a link to the article I selected:   Raisman Article


Not too bad for a free conversion. How can you access this?

The steps are easy! 
1. Find your article
2. Email the article URL to go@soundgecko.com
3. The article is sent to your email in mp3 format

Other ways to enjoy Soundgecko? You can download the Soundgecko iphone app from the iTunes store (it is free!), or get the Google Chrome Extension to tag articles. Soundgecko allows you to send the files to your Dropbox or other cloud storage site.

On to the next app...

TalkTyper is only available through the Google Chrome browser. It is free and easy to use. Basically all you have to do is click on the microphone icon and begin speaking. 

Your translated words will appear in a dialog box for you to see. I had fun testing the limits of the speech recognition software, and found that in order to improve accuracy, I had to speak at a slower rate than usual and enunciate, particularly with the softer letters and blends (p, th etc..). Fortunately, you can edit the text before cutting and pasting into your document. Try it out!

Math Musings, Part Deux

It has been way too long since I last posted! I have had MANY new ideas over the last (almost) year, and have had just too little time to write about it. Now that it is summer, I am hoping to renew my commitment to blogging about assistive tech and special ed.

During the last school year, I began teaching specialized math to 6th, 7th and 8th grade students in a pull out setting. It was truly an eye opening experience, and I have learned so much from my students. Now, as summer is in full swing, and I am beginning to think about my classes for next fall, I am wondering about how to best teach math to students who struggle to understand and retain concepts due to the nature of their learning differences.

Current Mathematical Methods:
Our current curriculum frameworks in Massachusetts are divided into 5 areas of concentration: Ratios and Proportions, The Number System, Expressions and Equations, Geometry and Statistics and Probability. At each middle school level, students explore and learn material from each strand, every year.

So, the question I have been asking is... is this the best way to teach math to special education students? Is it better to have student learn a "smattering" of each topic area, each year? Most of my students have difficulty with acquiring and retaining mathematical concepts. I can teach them fractions this year, and by next year's fraction unit, they have difficulty accessing previously learned concepts, even with frequent review/spiraling.

My Big Question:
This of course led me to wonder whether there is a better way to teach math to this population of learners. What if we teach each strand in depth? What if I spend more time teaching fewer strands each year, but teach them in depth? For example, what if I teach number systems to my 6th grade class, but continue to teach them 7th and even 8th grade topics after they have mastered 6th grade material. Keeping brain development in mind, what if I hold off teaching more difficult concepts, such as linear expression, proportions and ratios until 8th grade, but teach them the 6th, 7th and 8th grade material sequentially in one year? If I do this, my students will have been exposed to ALL strands for each middle school topics by the end of 8th grade, just not according to the flow of the state frameworks. Doing this, I think that students would have the opportunity to see how math knowledge is sequential, and how it builds upon previously learned concepts. I am not so sure that they make this connection in our current "a little bit of this, a little bit of that" math process.

Ahhh, yes, the down side...of course this would be reflected in our MCAS scores, as 6th grade students would not have learned all 6th grade content material, etc... However, they will have learned concepts above grade level in other areas. But my mind keeps spinning back to my question: would this approach help my struggling math students?

So What Now?
I have been asking both seasoned special educators and math teachers this question. The answer I get from most of them is surprising. They like this crazy idea of teaching fewer units each year, teaching them in depth, across grade levels. One math teacher told me that she agrees that the current flow of curriculum is fine for typical learners, but that my crazy idea might just be a better way to approach teaching math to students with learning differences. Now if only I can figure out a way to try this in the classroom.

Please feel free to leave me your opinion on this! I am interested in hearing all points of view, ideas and feedback.

Dyslexie - A new tool for the accessibility toolbox

The other night, during the 2 1/2 hour rain delay at Fenway Park, my niece and I chatted about twitter, blogging and other forms of information transfer. She mentioned that she had heard heard of a "new weighted font" that was developed to help those with dyslexia. Needless to say, I was intrigued with the idea of improving print accessibility for people with print disabilities.   


Dyslexia

Dyslexia is a life long condition that impacts literacy. It often runs in families, and is prevalent in approximately 10-15% of the population. It often goes undiagnosed. People with dyslexia tend to think non-verbally; they think in pictures rather than in words. This tends to be a problem in our text-driven society.

 

Enter Christian Boer and Studiostudio. Boer created Dyslexie not as a cure for dyslexia, but as a tool to help make type more readable. As a dyslectic himself, he reasoned that since dyslectics think visually and respond well to graphics, why not develop a new typeface that was more three dimensional than existing fonts?


Let Gravity Prevail

Boer found that adding "weight" to the bottom of characters anchored them to the baseline, and enabled struggling readers to identify and discriminate between visually similar letters (such as b and d or b and p).  Just like gravity pulls mass toward the center of the earth, the weighted portion of the letter is pulled down to the baseline.  Other typeset modifications include an increase in the ascending or descending lines on some letters, and tipping others from their north pole-south pole alignment. People with print disabilities made fewer word errors and miscues when reading text in Dyslexie typeface.

The Final Word
As of now, Dyslexie is not available as free-ware, and is currently priced at 700 Euros, or approximately $1,000.