Your student is not physically in the room for lessons, or suffers from chronic illness causing them to miss a lot of school, or their rural road is often not accessible to school bus and they have to stay home.
Try these solutions:
1. Screen Chomp is an excellent platform for iPads allowing you and your students to create quick and easy screen casts. 2. YouTube allows you to create your own channel and publish your screen casts. You can easily launch them from your website, making concepts and lessons available to remote students and parents. 3. ReadWorks is a huge, and very useful data base of high quality reading excerpts in PDF form that can be categorized for word length, grade level, genre, and more. 4. Showbie allows you push out assignments to you students, and allows them to complete them attach new documents, and push them back to you. You and your students are able to have private targeted communication about their work.
Scenario 2 - Organizational problems
Your student seems to lose everything. Their notebooks are falling apart or completely empty, and they do not seem to be able to get paper home and back to school. These organizational issues are stopping them from being prepared for class, and keeping them from succeeding.
Showbie
Notability
Pic Collage
Your website
You need to consider that serious disorganization problems are just as frustrating for the student as they are for you in trying to help them. His or Her self esteem has probably taken a beating if these problems have persisted for some time. Remind your student that it is all about finding tools to help them track and hold on to things. Assure him or her that success is around the corner if we find the right tools, but they have to be part of the solution. He or she will have to evaluate whether a solution will work for them in the long term, and then they will have to use it consistently.
Try these solutions:
1. Showbie allows you push out assignments to your students, and allows them to complete them attach new documents, and push them back to you. You and your students are able to have private targeted communication about their work. Because this is paperless, you and your student know their work can not be dropped or lost. 2. Notability is a great app for providing UDL on the iPad. This program allows audio recording, use of stylus to write or draw, and typing as well. Images can be inserted. Think of it as a word processor on steroids. The bonus: everything contained in a device - nothing dropped on the floor. 3. Pic Collage can solve a lot of creative expression issues if posters and signs get lost half way through the students' process. Students can create fantastic visuals easily (with text, backgrounds, and images) on Pic Collage, and these images can be inserted into movies, documents, and anything else they wish to create. 4. Teaching Website - this can be the saving grace for kids who lose or misplace work, or forget their assignments and rubrics. By posting all information on your site they have another source for retrieval as well as for screen casts to update them on concepts introduced in class. However, the biggest plus of a website is the access to information for parents who are trying to support their child in school.
Scenario 3 - Behaviour
No child goes to school thinking, "I want to disrupt classes and frustrate the people around me". Bad or unexpected behaviour is one of the most difficult things to manage in a classroom and it can take a LOT of time and effort to make lasting change. However, that hard work will pay off when disruptions are reduced and students become more independent in the class.
1. Social Behaviour Mapping - Sourcing the Problem - If a student is exhibiting "red zone" behaviour, he or she may not be aware of the triggers. behaviours. This takes investigation and careful observation. In this process, it can be helpful to work through a social behaviour map, getting your student to recognize the impact of their behaviour, and to clearly see "If I do ________, then peers and adults will respond by doing ____________.
2.Zones of Regulation - Depending on the severity of the behaviour, you may want to consider The Zones of Regulation program either for whole class instruction or as a resource support for individual students. The Zones is a systematic, cognitive behavior approach used to teach self-regulation by categorizing all the different ways we feel and states of alertness we experience into four concrete zones. The Zones curriculum provides strategies to teach students to become more aware of, and independent in controlling their emotions and impulses, managing their sensory needs, and improving their ability to problem solve conflicts.
3. Way to A - Children with ASD are often confused by our world of rules and consequences, including how their behavior impacts another person or situation. The result is often aggressive behavior. The Way to A, designed for children ages 3 to 9 years old, presents a simple, logical, and systematic strategy that clarifies and sequentially teaches the child how to manage his behavior by engaging in forethought and self-analysis before acting out. What sets this strategy apart is that it then goes on to give the child a personal and concrete incentive to use the alternative behavior. This program is also beneficial with younger students with ADHD who have difficulty making good choices due to impulsive behaviour.
This is a great lesson to work through with students, helping them to identify good and bad choices. From there, you can move on to developing a social story that he or she can listen to each day in order to front load them and make those good choices foremost in students' minds.
4. MindUp - MindUP™ teaches social and emotional learning skills that link cognitive neuroscience, positive psychology and mindful awareness training utilizing a brain centric approach.
5. Class Dojo - if you have students with ADHD or impulsive behaviour, they require regular visual reminders of consequences to their actions. Class Dojo is an excellent program for teachers to use that create these visuals, allowing teachers to identify skills they want to build by creating their own bank of reward points. Similarly you are able to take away points for negative behaviour. The students hear a negative tone sound and a visual as the points are taken away. This program comes with a lot of support materials giving teachers access to videos and lessons that support emotional regulation, growth mindset and much more. If teachers choose to they can have parents connect on Dojo so they can see how their child is progressing in the day and see any problems as they occur. Teachers and parents also have the ability to message each other if the teacher chooses that option.
6.Pictello - this is a great app for creating social stories with personalized voices and images. Students may play these stories or teachers may "tap" their way through if they wish to have more control (like a slide show). The story, then, is also a teaching tool.
7.Book Creator - this app is another alternative for social stories. It will require you creating the formatting (already done for you in Pictello), but is much more affordable.
Scenario 4 - Reading Disability
Your student HATES reading. Decoding is a frustrating and very slow process. However, you notice that he or she enjoys listening to stories and has good retention of detail.
CoWriter
Opendyslexic Font
Freckle
Some basic in-roads you have to make are reducing frustration over reading while hitting their strength in comprehension. This will help your student to work to their strengths and allow them to love learning.
Try these solutions:
1. Voice Dream Reader is an iPad app for reading books aloud. This app has more natural voices. It will highlight text as it reads, and it has easy pause and stop functions.
2. CoWriter is an app that has predictive software to help writers get their ideas out more easily. You can create topic dictionaries, helping the software to identify the words you will likely want to access. The app will ead all their work back to them as they write, helping them to find errors in their work.
3. ReadWorks provides high quality PDFs for reading lessons.
4. Showbie allows you to push out those PDFs.
5. Opendyslexc Font - a free typeface that helps some students to read more easily due to the weighted letters and the slight tilt of some letters. This allows them to distinguish letters more easily and read with less strain. Using this font in classroom assignments or tests can be helpful for many students.
6. Freckle has targeted math practice. The app tracks and adapts to the student's level of expertise, but also allows the teacher to assign practice from specific outcomes. This app also provides visual demonstrations, screen casts, and audio of all the questions, as well as a scratch pad for calculations.
7. Claro is for reading the PDFs that you can send out to your student, and allows them to write, type or voice record answers.
Scenario 5 - Writing/Processing Disability
Your student HATES writing, or labours over written tasks and is unable to keep up with class due to this struggle. They have good ideas, and teacher-scribing has become an adaptation, but you need to help them become more independent.
Write About This
CoWriter
Lower Case
1. Write About This - an excellent app for students who require visual prompts. This app allows teachers and students to create specific prompts with their own photos, as well as providing a bank of interesting photo story starters. They can type or use Voice to Text function, save their work, share to their camera, and easily turn in work on Showbie.
2. CoWriter - a predictive software app that allows teachers to create topic dictionaries. Students who struggle to spell words benefit from the predictive software that shows them 4 - 5 choices of possible words they may be looking for, and a quick touch allows them to insert the word.This app also reads the text to student after completing a sentence, allowing them to check their work for errors.
3. Lowercase - a keyboard that can be downloaded to provide your student with a keyboard with Opendyslexic font. This allows them to find the correct letter more easily.
Scenario 6 - Math Weakness and Anxiety
Your student is behind in basic math skills. He or she does not appear to have a learning difference, but they may have gaps in their learning due to a variety of reasons (different school system, illness, etc.). This delay creates a domino effect making current grade level work hard to understand, and that in turn raises your student's anxiety level. He or she constantly feels unable to keep up. Your student hates math.
Freckle Math
Try these solutions:
1. Freckle - Freckle Math provides over 15 thousand common core aligned questions that are graded automatically and given to students based on their level. This means no writing worksheets, no grading, and differentiated teaching made easy. Freckle Math has:Over 28,000 common core questions. It provides different modalities to suit many needs, with video instruction, audio, scratch pads, and visuals. Front row levels your students ensuring that they work on the skills they need to address for their individual level of math.
2. Thinking Blocks - and excellent program that helps students to visualize and solve word problems in a logical step by step process.This gives them a solid foundation for tackling word problems independently. It is available for different operations.
3. Math Slide - a fun way to practice mental math, applying pictures numbers and words. This is a great app for the class or home as from 1 to 4 players may play simultaneously making it competitive. The app is designed to ensure that even slow processors can have success as it will continue to propose questions that only the slowest participant can answer. The app is also progressive, getting slightly more difficult as each level is completed, with 9 levels for each app. Available in a variety of operations and concepts.
4. Showbie - in this particular scenario, Showbie can help to reduce stress as individual worksheets can be pushed out to students via the Showbie platform, and thus differentiation of work is less obvious.
Scenario 6 - Math Memory
Your student struggles with organizational problems, which in turn has an impact on their working memory (ability to hold numbers, images, words in their mind to do multi-step problems.
1. Showbie - Showbie could be one of the single most important tools in the toolbox for a student with poor working memory. Teachers can push out documents to their students, but they can also push out anchor charts, which makes it possible for you student to have these important reminders on their device and close at hand. 2. Anchor Charts and Tables - visual reminders will be important resources for these students. Whether you use Word Docx, or an online poster-maker like Piktochart, creating anchor charts that the student may refer to as they work will help him or her work with greater independence. 3. Freckle- Freckle Math provides over 15 thousand common core aligned questions that are graded automatically and given to students based on their level. This means no writing worksheets, no grading, and differentiated teaching made easy. Freckle Math has:Over 28,000 common core questions. It provides different modalities to suit many needs, with video instruction, audio, scratch pads, and visuals. Front row is very visual and has hints to keep the student on track as they work through the problems. It could help these students to work more independently. 4. Website - a class website is a valuable tool for access to videos and other visual reminders of math procedures.