This week I was busy downloading education apps for my iPad, and I found some useful ones for my students.
Speech with Milo is fabulous. It is a speech therapy tool for children, but it is also a good tool for teaching language development and reading skills to children. I think it would work well for students who are hard to engage or for teaching concepts that are difficult to articulate. It helps students develop basic language building skills, and it ties in well with what we're learning in our literacy class. It also emphasizes storytelling, which is great because it teaches sequencing and it's interactive! Did I mention that the little mouse acts out adjectives and verbs? I'm a pretty big fan of this app.
I'm wondering how I would use this app in the classroom. I can see the benefit for one on one instruction with kids, but if every student doesn't have an ipad in front of them, how would I make this work?
I also discovered some Special Education Apps that can really benefit students with visual, hearing, and/or speaking challenges, and they also account for different learning styles. They have apps in categories that are broken down for communication, emotional development, seeing & hearing, language development, etc. What is completely baffling to me is the price tag of each app. The first one listed is close to $200. Not doable on a students salary, and I suspect not on a teacher's salary either. I wonder why is it so expensive? But, how big of a difference might this make for students with learning or social disabilities who aren't getting the one on one support they need?
I'm currently browsing through the Apps for Teachers and I'm seeing plenty of whiteboard apps that are reminiscent of Mrs. North's portable whiteboard tool. Also, Toontastic is a tool where students can create their own stories, and narrate the stories themselves. It has a few rave reviews from teachers, but it also sounds like they work in schools where each student has an ipad. Again, I'm wondering how this might work if we didn't have enough ipads to go around- but it's still fun to think about the possibilities and the potential for apps in the classroom.
One of the ways that many teachers use hand-held devices like Touches or Ipads is for independent work that can work much better than just sending kids off to do worksheets. They're almost never used for whole class instruction.
ReplyDeleteAnd many classes won't have full-class sets. What if there were devices at stations in different parts of the room that kids could rotate through? What if kids made up a schedule for taking turns on the devices that the class does have?
Wow. $200 apps? That's a first for me!
There are so many alternatives. What accommodations are you envisioning? What else might do those same things? What budgets do schools have for serving special needs kids that you could tap into for some of these tools?
I have a collection of whiteboard apps I'm happy to share -- many allow the learner to make an audio recording of what he or she is drawing... pretty cool for tracking learning along the way.
Looking forward to what you come up on this search!
Thank you for asking what budgets schools have for students with special needs- I completely forgot that there are resources like that out there! In my dyad placement, they have multiple resources for their high cap kids that help to fund their unique program. I attended a meeting this week where funding was brought up multiple times and I've realized that there is funding out there- but it definitely takes a lot of creativity to access some of it...
ReplyDeleteAnd by "creativity", I mean creative wording, and envisioning resources that may seem like they wouldn't apply- but do!
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