Julia James - Improving Special Ed Online Instruction

This week, Chris sits down with Julia James to talk about ideas for improving online instruction for students in special education. Julia supports online students as part of a special ed support team for her school district, and she called Chris to ask his thoughts on improving online education with technology.

Before the interview, Chris talks with Rachel about the film Crip Camp. Campers who went to this camp after Woodstock went on to be leaders in the civil rights movement for people with disabilities. Chris talks about how he was inspired by what people did for others in this film, and how it motivates him to continue to support people with disabilities. Rachel talks about Camp ALEC, a camp where they teach literacy and AAC. After filming at Camp ALEC, Rachel’s friend Chris Stout was inspired to pursue a feature length film about AAC. Films like this can showcase how AAC is successful in helping people, which can then get more people on board with AAC. A lot of people don’t know what AAC is and haven’t seen it implemented successfully.

Key ideas this week include:

🔑 Making technological supports, like text to speech, available to everyone and not just one group of students allows students to help each other and allows special ed students to “fit in” with everyone else when they are using those tools.

🔑 Make sure that special education has a voice at the table in the selection phase for technology tools. Not every tool has the same level of accessibility options (e.g. some “locked” textbooks can’t be read by text-to-speech). Grackle is an accessibility checker that checks to make sure accessibility tools work with a particular file or document.

🔑 We really need to be educating parents and not just providing direct minutes to the students. If we can help parents become better at supporting the students, the students can have more learning opportunities overall and better accountability from parents.

🔑 Choice, engagement, and variety are really important with online learning. For example, engaging kids with different games and using a variety of activities. We want to provide structure - let students know what to expect when they show up to your virtual classroom with schedules, timers, etc. Give students choices and then reflect on that, even when things don’t work out like you planned or the students pick the wrong thing.

🔑 Kids missed social connections the most during online learning. Providing that virtually can be really rewarding for students. For example, you can let kids have some time to talk in a breakout room as a reward for getting through a lesson. Connections with others can be just as important for learning as the content itself.

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