Blogs & Social Media

Grant Wiggins: https://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/

Huff English: http://www.huffenglish.com/

“Thoughts on English Education and Technology”

Parenting the Core: http://parentingthecore.wordpress.com/

“A Parent’s Thoughts on Education in the Era of Reform”

Taught by Finalnd: http://www.taughtbyfinland.com/home

“An American Teacher at a Finland school”

Karl Fisch: http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/

The Life That Chose Me: http://specialed.wordpress.com/

“My life in a world of exceptionalities”

Edutopia: http://www.edutopia.org/

• This is really just an excellent site. There’s too much to summarize. Go click around!

Flip Your Thinking: http://versoapp.com/flip-your-thinking/

https://twitter.com/flipyrthinking

• There is also an app related to this called Verso App. This is all about flipping the classroom and using technology in online spaces for learning.

Edudemic: http://www.edudemic.com/

https://twitter.com/edudemic

https://www.facebook.com/edudemic

• “Connecting Education and Technology”
• it addresses so much more than just technology, including SED, so give it a look!

Teach 100: http://teach.com/teach100

• This is a list of 100 top education blogs, ranked daily. If there aren’t enough for you here, check it out!

Jordan Shapiro: https://twitter.com/jordosh

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/author/jordosh/

• A Forbes writer for Education Technology (EdTech)

Jeff Goldstein: https://twitter.com/doctorjeff

http://blogontheuniverse.org/about-drjeff/

• A STEM educator and physicist, worked with NASA
• focuses on Science education

Gary Stager, Ph.D.: https://twitter.com/garystager

http://stager.org/bio.html

• The website is really ugly, but has lists of tools and a lot on technology
• “Progressive educator, university professor”

Ed Brazee: https://twitter.com/edbrazee

http://umaine.edu/hr/employees/recognition-retirees/honorees-by-last-name/dr-edward-brazee/

• “helping adults learn to use technology creatively and productively”
• one of U Maine’s own!

Wesley Fryer, Ph.D.: https://twitter.com/wfryer

http://www.wesfryer.com/

http://www.speedofcreativity.org/

• This guy works a lot with media as learning tools.

Graphite: https://www.graphite.org/

• “we... make it easier for educators to find the best apps, games, and websites for the classroom”
• a division of common sense media

Common Sense Media: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/

• “we rate, educate, and advocate for kids, families, and schools”

Attention Getting Strategies

This is a one minute video on how to practice attention getting signals so that your students really know it and respond to it. It’s part of a series that can be found on YouTube on Teaching Channel.

4Teachers

This site has a lot of resources to use, such as a “family of tools” section that includes sites like RubiStar and Think Tank along with many others. It focuses largely on assistive technology. There are sections that focus on the history of assistive technology, like the page about IDEA and how it was integrated into that.  One section of the page lists ways to apply for funding for assistive technology.

Transition Coalition

This is a solid place to go for tips on student transition. It has sections on students who are going straight to a job. There is also a .pdf of a long list of transition tips. There are also sections on training, collaboration, publications, and resources (all available from the first link).

My Next Move | O*Net Interest Profiler

This is one of those free online quizzes that helps students see where their interests are and what jobs they might relate to. It has different levels of education that would be required for each set of jobs, from high school diploma to a doctorate degree.

Understood | Teaching Reading to Struggling Readers

Question: How do I get students with various learning disabilities engaged in the general education English classroom?

There is a more comprehensive post about this website already on here; but this post looks specifically at the section for teaching reading. This website gives some background on what reading comprehension looks like today and what it should look like for teenagers and, more specifically, teenagers with learning disabilities. It then lists several strategies that can help develop reading skills in students with learning disabilities.

Intervention Central

Question: How do you address a student with disabilities using problem behaviors as their mode of communication?

This website section allows students to create a self-check behaviour list. It’s a tool to make one of their own, which can help them develop self-determination skills and manage their own behaviour. It also has sections for academic interventions and behaviour interventions. It is largely focused on RTI.

iSeek Education

Question: What are the benefits of service learning for students, both with and without disabilities?

iSEEK is a website that further explains service learning and the methodology behind its success. The site offers project examples and ideas, student success stories, and tools to create your own service project. This resource helps teachers find projects they can implement by providing links to larger databases of projects. Finally, it connects you to another site that helps to evaluate what makes an inclusive and high quality project - which will help you determine what is a good project in the future.

Teaching Tolerance | Disability Awareness

Question: How can I promote student understanding and awareness of students with disabilities without isolating them or bringing them attention they may not want?

This particular link leads to a story of a program one teacher used to promote inclusion between a very diverse group of students. It lists clearly defined steps that the teacher used, and is an interesting story. There is a whole lot more available on this website, so click around. Try the search term "disability awareness" and you'll find many articles, including a few specific results that are lessons.

Assistive Technologies (Chart)

Assistive Technologies

Product Name	Description
Highlight strips	These are colored slips that you can move over each line of reading that block out the other sections around it. This minimizes distractions and helps a reader focus on a small section of what they need to read.
Tobii	This is a computer that tracks eye movements to work. It even has a mobile version, for tablets and such.
Active Words	This allows you to add abbreviations to a dictionary so that you can type a shorter set of letters to get the word you want. You can also launch programs using the monitor bar.
Text Expander	This is a program similar to Active Words. You can type faster by entering abbreviations and getting word suggestions as you type.
Assistive Tech for Struggling Readers	This chart details many different ways to help struggling readers. It even suggests an age level that is appropriate (elementary, middle, or high school).
Inspiration	This is mind mapping software that you can use to convert from a mind map to an outline and back. There is a “kid” version. You can customize it greatly with pictures, colors, and more.
Audible	This is a paid service that has many audiobooks that you can listen to. It works on mobile.
Action Trackchair	This is a wheelchair like you've never seen. There are many versions: they climb stairs, they go through sand, they have tank treads!
Social Compass	This is a new mobile program that is currently in testing. It helps people with autism to determine appropriate social actions and reactions.
KNOWbility Chart	This is a website with a list of different kinds of assistive technologies for different categories of disabilities. It ranges from low tech like glasses to high tech like hand-held scanners.
Reading Rockets Chart	This is a website that lists specific assistive tech to help students with learning disabilities in different subject and skill areas.
LD Online Info	This is a website that addresses different methods of tech to use for students with learning disabilities.

Ideas for Classroom Management

Ideas for Classroom Management

•  Organization of space is huge
• Consider lighting, decorations, furniture, equipment/storage
• Organization of furniture
• Arrange for different activities, switch up groups of students, make materials accessible, ensure student/teacher ease of navigation, make sure it’s accessible
• Climate & Rules
• Which students get along? To what extent can you push boundaries/alter animosity?
• Consider student desires & input when creating class expectations, rules, procedures
• Make sure to make everything explicit, clear, unambiguous
• Teacher design
• Creating different activities based around MIs and DI
• Incorporate active learning
• Consider cooperative learning methods
• Positive Behaviour Supports (PBS)
• Acknowledge positive behaviours to reinforce them and avoid reinforcing negative behaviours with attention (even if corrective)
• Proactive methods include prompting, positive reinforcement, and cues
• Teaching students to reform and monitor their own behaviour can empower them and help curtail negative behaviours (consider Ms Miles teaching to knit)
• Reinforcers of behaviour
• Positive reinforcement: rewarding a behaviour to encourage its repetition
• Primary Reinforcers: edibles, sensory stimulation such as music, soft items, movement. Often used with young children learning behaviours for first time
• Secondary Reinforcers: tangible items, privileges or activities, generalized items (tokens, grade points), social opportunities (seating arrangements, etc.)

To Decrease Inappropriate Behaviour

1.       Discipline must be consistent with goal of safe & caring classroom

2.       Instructional activities must be minimally interrupter

3.       Misbehavior or not? It depends on the context

4.       Match the severity of discipline with behaviour

5.       Be culturally responsive

Addressing Minor Issues

1.       Change classroom environment; rearrange desks, students, etc.

2.       Cues & redirection: eye contact, gestures, proximity, verbal communication (inserting student’s name into question, example, etc.), response request (ask them a question, even a simple one)

3.       Ignore the behaviour; be sure to monitor class to decide if it is getting worse or going away

4.       Extinction: withholding a reinforcer (usually attention) from a negative behaviour to make it gradually decrease and stop. Must be sure that behaviour does not escalate to an unacceptable/interruptive point

5.       Establish and maintain consequences of rule violations; especially helpful if students helped develop them early on. Make sure that consequences are directly related to the issue to establish connection between behaviour and punishment

SEDL | (Formerly) Southwest Educational Development Laboratory

This site hid the acronym for their name so well that I’m still not totally sure what it stands for. Regardless, there is a section on the fourteen cognitive elements of reading that is worth a look. Having a solid understanding of these elements of reading can help when trying to teach skills for reading and comprehension to any grade or ability level. There is also a section that addresses how to assess a student’s understanding.

U of Oregon | CTL: Center on Teaching and Learning

This site has a page dedicated to the five basic elements of reading and learning to read (Phonemic Awareness, Alphabetic Principle, Fluency with Text, Vocabulary, Comprehension). Each of these sections is then broken down even further to describe in detail what each idea is as well as what it looks like when applied and why they can help when used properly.

Carnegie Mellon | Teaching Excellence Center

This website is jam packed with resources and ideas. They have sections on designing and teaching a course, which considers instructional strategies and how to teach different students (cultures, levels, socioeconomic, etc.) and touches upon inclusion. The section on technology has things from wikis and blogs to flipped classrooms, and includes digital classes and using mobile devices. There is a whole detailed section on assessment, both of the students and the teacher.