Technology and sped students.

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Home : 2001 : February : 22

Technology and sped students.
By Jessie

Hello,

I am glad you are looking to use more technology in your resource room. I am a big fan of technology and wanted to be able to make it useful to my sped students. I know you are worried that a lot of parents will
be upset about using computers, and I ran into this problem too. Then, when we had parent teacher conference, I brought in all the parents who were concerned about that and sat down and showed each one the programs that I use. I explained to them that these "games" were very educational for their child because it allows the basic drill and practice that so many kids need and still keeps

their attention span unlike worksheets, ect. I showed them charts I had been keeping tracking their students skill proficeny and showed them how thye were improving. I showed them a lot of the other stuff we do, so they wouldn't feel their child spent all their time in the resource room on the computer. Before they left, not one parent had anything against their child "playing" on the computer!! Clifford (The Big Red Dog) software has really worked well for one of our students. We just purchased some for our classroom to help one of our Down's students learn word discrimination, letter discrimintation, and on and on!! This child could not read one word before using this product and we had tried everything from EdMark reading to try and make our own reading program. Within weeks he can recognize the words the, a, boy, girl, and he knows them. Now, when we read books to him, he picks out those words! He is very happy and is starting to pick out words in his EdMark reading. Another piece of software is the Arthur products (like the cartoon character). We have the Aurther's First Grade software...and he has learned a lot from that, too. I don't know if these will work for you kids, but they sure worked for us! (Because software is sooo expensive, I suggest trying to use it before buying it because not everything works for every kid. We have a TIE (Technology Innovations in Education) service in our state where we can write to them requesting to preview software before we decide to buy it...it has saved us lots of money on buying things that sound good...but actually are not.

I also had a problem getting many of my more higher functioning kids to write. They hate writing and are so unmotivated to do so. So, one day I took out our digital camera and the student and I wandered all over the school grounds and the school building snapping pictures for a "book". This really appealed to my student. It was rocky at first, since I had no real lesson in mind, but for my next students I asked them to think of what they wanted to write about so we would know what we were looking for. We both came up with ideas and wrote them on the board and choosed one to write about. What wonderful idea's these students had. One wrote an ABC book about school, another wrote a book of poems about things at school, another yet took a picture of her locker and wrote a very funny story about a creature who lived in her locker and was leaving her notes about how messy it was! We got into a drawing program and brought her picture up into it and she even drew the creature right on to the picture. I never saw this kid want to write like I did that day! Yet another student took a picture of a piece of tumbleweed in the snow and wrote a poem about a city from an airale (sp?) view. It was wonderful...he used metephores and all sorts of writing skills that he balked at using ever before. Besides helping their basic skills of writing along...they all got to know how to use a digital camera, a scanner, and paint programs. (Another software we use when writing is Story Book Weaver Deluxe which allows students to write and illustrate their own books! Some of my students have really liked it...others have not.)

I push technology very hard when ever appropriate because I feel that we are on the verge of a time when, if students of all needs, don't have some sort of knowledge about it...they won't be able to succeed as well in the "real world" as if they had some knowledge. Its been a wonderful experience for me as a teacher, and I can see how wonderful it has been for my students. I am sorry this got so long...you can email me if you have more questions. I hope this helped somewhat, I know you were looking for something that is a non-game atmosphere, but I also wanted to let you know some software that has worked for us.