Teaching Learners with Multiple Special Needs

Thursday, July 3, 2008

Parents Who Blog

Lately, I have been reading a lot of blogs written by parents of children with special needs, especially children with severe, intensive or complex needs. Reading these blogs is a whole different kind of education, it helps put into perspective the whole life of students, beyond the 30 hours a week, 180 days a year they spend with in the classroom. It also helps one to appreciate "the other side of the table"

A colleague and I have been speaking a lot lately about how we could do more for parents as professionals, and just today I spoke with another friend about a philosophy of mine that I have been following for the past four years - "approach every interaction (with a parent - or anyone really) as a chance to make their load lighter and their path easier to travel." Since adopting that stance I have have very, very few negative interactions with parents. Still I wonder how we as professionals could do more to work with parents to attain the best possible outcomes for there students. How can we create better partnerships? How can we best present information? How can we create school-home carry over (and vice versa)? How can we point them towards resources for things like respite, personal care attendants, transition, community leisure opportunities, behavior management and AAC? Reading these blogs by parents of children with special needs helps me think about approaches that might work.

Here are the blogs I have been reading:

Pam and Josh's Blog - an active AAC Family
Micro Preemie Twins Blog (the video of Eden in her first power chair is a must see)
Postcards from Holland
The Ups and Downs of Raising 3 Amazing Kids
Lucy May
Maternal Instincts...Flying by the Seat of My Pants
Our Little Piece of the World (great photography)
Fighting Monsters with Rubber Swords (today's entry about Schuyler asking for a big girl voice on her AAC device is very touching, this blog is now a published as a book entitled Schuyler's Monster)

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

10 Days Left to Help My Class Get an Interactive White Board

There are only 10 days left on my class's Donors Choose grant application for an Interactive Whiteboard. Right now only $611 out of $2,833 has been funded (by two individual donors, both women, both from Massachusetts. Thank you so much Kirsten and Laura!

Regular readers of this blog know the many exciting ideas my class and I have for using an interactive white board. We plan to use it for every subject, from using it with Boardmaker SDP as an interactive talking calendar and weather map during morning meeting to using it with sites like Silly Books or Tumblebooks with the mouse on the arrow for single switch users to "read" a giant interactive book to their friends. We will use it for all subjects. To read about how other teachers are using interactive whiteboards check out Talking Smart Boards or Teachers Love Smart Boards.

With just a little over $2,100 left and an average of 200 visitors a day all it would take is 15 dollars a visitor during the course of just one day to fund our interactive whiteboard or even $100 from one or two visitors a day for the next ten days. Please, if you appreciate this blog and the time and effort put into it please donate to this Donors Choose grant or one of our other Donors Choose grants below:

Boardmaker Freebies

During the process of cleaning up the links I visit each and today I went back to an old favorite Dade School's Pre-Kindergarten Boardmaker Page. They have totally re-done there site and added tons of materials, everything from books and recipes to songs and place mats. Check it out!

CLiCk,Speak for Firefox 3.

I was pretty excited when Firefox 3 came out a couple of weeks ago, but my excitement waned when I realized some of the best accessibility features, such as Accessibar, CLiCk, Speak and FireVox weren't ready to go yet. Today Paul Hamilton at Free Resources from the Net for (Special) Education shared that one of these Firefox add-ons, CLiCK, Speak is ready! After some checking I discovered that Fire Vox and Accessibar are also ready.

CLiCk,Speak is a free Firefox Add-On that enables someone to put the cursor where you want to begin reading and click the green button, then click the red button to stop. Another option is to highlight a section and click the white button.

To adjust the CLiCK, Speak options go to Firefox ‘Tools’ then to ‘CliCk,Speak Options’. You can change the reading rate and the pitch of the voice.

I have had students with various disabilities from Down's syndrome to cerebral palsy with intellectual impairment use CLiCK, Speak to better access the web

Fire Vox is "an open source, freely available talking browser extension for the Firefox web browser. Think of it as a screen reader that is designed especially for Firefox... . All Fire Vox commands are keyboard activated. In addition, the keyboard commands can be easily reconfigured in the self-voicing Fire Vox Options menu to avoid conflicts with other accessibility software products or to suit personal preferences. For sighted users who need a screen reader, such as web developers interested in testing their webpages or educators who work with visually impaired students, Fire Vox's highlighting feature makes it easy to keep track of where it is reading from on a page. This highlighting feature is also useful for dyslexic users and partially sighted users."

Here is a great tip for using Fire Vox with single switch users to listen to (and read along with highlighting) online texts and e-books in the Firefox browser. CTRL+Shift+F is the hot key combination for "read next chunk", if you use a configurable switch interface (such as Joy Box USB or X-Keys), using a macro or joy to key software and set the switch to CTRL+Shift+F, then a student can have the computer read the website or e-book paragraph by paragraph by pressing a switch to advance. If you prefer sentence by sentence reading you can enter the Fire Vox menu option by pressing Ctrl+Shift+M and then turn on "read by sentence".

Accessibar is an (almost) full accessibility add-on for Fire Fox. It allows you to change the text and back ground color to any of 70 choices, change the font and font size, the link spacing, hide the graphics (including flash) and read aloud with a single click. It is complex for our most involved students, so usually it is best to train paraprofessionals and peer tutors to use Accessibar to set up the web it is more accessible for some students.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Dynavox Announces Eye Gaze Control

There have been rumors for a while, but today Dynavox has formally announced eye gaze control for the Dynavox Vmax coming in the fall. They are calling the device the EyeMax. It has been designed working with the folks at Eye Tech. The EyeMax will be an add-on accessory, it works via USB connection and is compatiable with any VMax that has 512MB or 1GB RAM for memory. Individuals at dynvaox have told me that they believe it accomodates extranneous head movement as much as any other device out there, including the Tobii, but that a full evaluation with the EyeMax should be done before ordering*.

Dynavox believes that having the EyeMax being an add-on access piece (like a switch or track pad is) will work better for folks with progressive disorders like ALS, muscular dystrophy and mitochondrial disease. Thus the EyeMax can be ordered when it is needed, as opposed to buying one device that become obsolete and then having to replace it with a device that has integrated eye gaze control. My only concern is the usual concern, funding. Maybe, just maybe the powers that be of funding will realize it is cheaper to buy one device and add an EyeMax later, but somehow, I doubt it.

*(Ed's note - obviously a full eval with device and access should always be done before ordering)

AAC Resources and Products

Links to companies, agencies and foundations that either sell products relating to AAC or provide information and supports about AAC. (This perma post updated July 2, 2008.)