Solutions

Solutions


In my quest of searching for the Best Practices of Integrating Technology into Special Education, I have found many Web sites and documents that offer a wealth of information and research related to using informational technology to facilitate quality educational programs. Many of these sites include research on principles of learning, information processing, content standards, lesson planning, Federal Law, and teacher knowledge.

BATEC Is transforming education to develop the IT Professional for the 21st Century, while providing extensive professional development to educators, including specific workshops and training in curriculum development. Closer collaboration with community and industry by bringing together representatives from education, industry and community organizations to support curriculum development and performance assessment that meet industry needs.

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience .

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including web hosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a University with 200,000 students.

Podcasting is amateur radio at its best: people from all around the world are recording their own broadcasts on topics ranging from technology to religion. Listeners subscribe to the broadcasts, which are downloaded to your computer or to an iPod for listening on-the-go.

Audacity is free, award-winning open source software for recording and editing sound. It runs on Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. Audacity allows anyone to create a simple voice and music Podcast with Audacity.

Lynda is an Online Training Library where you can learn the latest tools and techniques in digital media, design, and development. Some of the benefits of lynda.com allow educators to be current on the new technology available, develop new software skills, and learn with video based training that allows one to stop, rewind, and replay all tutorials. One can choose from over five hundred courses.

Ivy's Search Engine Resources for Kids is a great site to begin your searching for some impressive lesson plans, and kid friendly search engines. There are also many useful links to web guides for kids.

del.icio.us is an online social bookmarking site for anyone who would like to save their favorite websites in one place. You can save your bookmarks from many computers into one online resource, organize them for easy access to related resources, and share them with colleagues or students.

Quia is a place where you can create your own educational games, quizzes, class Web pages, surveys, and much more. The site includes millions of activities and quizzes that are created by educators from around the world.

Blogging can be used for writing, and editing the students work. Blogs have become a means for educators, students, and administrators to interact more effectively than ever before.

Back to Top

LD Online The LD Online is the world's leading Website on learning disabilities and ADHD. The Using Technology in the Classroom articles provide information on how to use assistive technology in the classroom to help students with learning disabilities or ADHD.

Read Please Reads any text you see on your screen - all purpose text-to-speech software. Readplease can greatly benefit students with communication impairments, and or/learning disabilities.”

Inspiration Software is an important tool that helps students plan, research and complete projects successfully. With the integrated Diagram and Outline Views, students create graphic organizers and expand topics into writing. This powerful combination encourages learning in multiple modes. As a result, students gain and retain a better understanding of concepts and demonstrate knowledge, improving their performance across the curriculum

KidSpace at the Internet Public Library is a public service of a consortium of Universities. This is one of the best resources that link to Kid Safe Websites, from Reference, to Fun Stuff. This site is filled with teaching resources organized by subject such as, “Our World”, “Computers & Internet”, “Math” and “Science”.

The Boston Public Schools Access Technology (ATC)
Tools and Strategies to Support Access to Standards-Based Learning for Diverse Learners is a great PDF file full of resources Compiled by: Boston Public Schools Access Technology Center at Emmanuel College, in collaboration with Maureen P. Dacey, M.S., CCC-SLP Easter Seals of Massachusetts, 03/04/02

Kathy Schrock's guide for educators is a portal of possibilities for effective integration of technology into the curriculum. This is a great site for educators; the Guide for Educators is a categorized list of Websites useful for enhancing curriculum and professional growth. It is updated often to include some of the best sites for teaching and learning.

Council for Exceptional Children presents Evidence-Based Practices. Teachers need to have the time, tools, and resources to implement such practices. Resources are a major factor in implementing practices, where there is a lack of standards. This site discusses the need for teachers to use research-based strategies to improve their students’ success.

The eSchoolNews Web site provides news, information, and analyses for schools and educators combining technology, the Internet, and traditional education. The Web site also gives readers resources to help them transform conventional schools into eSchools, information how technology and the Internet are affecting education.

Education World's makes it easy for educators to integrate the Internet into the classroom. It provides a complete online resource where educators can find lesson plans and research materials

Tripod is a free web host with easy site building tools. It is a basic introduction to site building, which allows educators the ability to have free sites with tools for blogs, photo albums, classroom assignments, teacher introductions and more.

Schoolrack is an online site where you can Create a FREE teacher website! Start posting information online in less than five minutes! Post files, publish assignments, and more

Multiplication.com contains techniques, tips, and secrets used by master teachers! The site offers a selection of worksheets, activities, quizzes and online games for diverse learners at any level.

Discovery School is a web site of Discovery Communications (Discovery Channel, Science Channel, and Animal Planet). The resources on this site have exceptionally high educational value for both teachers and students. Students will find study help with their homework through engaging games and interactive learning tools.

HowStuffWorks, is the award-winning Discovery Communications site for credible, unbiased, and easy-to-understand explanations of how the world actually works. Founded by North Carolina State University Professor Marshall Brain in 1998, the site is now an online resource for millions of people of all ages.

Looking for search engines? Search more of the web with A-Z Internet Search Engines directory of search sites. Learn a little more about all the search engines, web directories, and portals, and search them all from one place.

GetNetWise is a public service of Internet industry corporations and public interest organizations to help ensure that Internet users have safe, constructive, and educational or entertaining online experiences. One can learn about the risks kids face online, search or browse for Internet safety products, browse high quality, kid friendly sites and learn how to identify online dangers.

Rubrics are excellent grading tools. Rubrics can help cut down on grading time while ensuring more objective grading practices. Check out the About.com's, Writing and Grading Rubrics section, it is filled with many templates for creating simple tools to help in assessment of student work, you will find reasons, step-by-step instructions and great examples of rubrics. About.com

Graphic Organizers

Research shows that when you use graphic organizers you encourage students to think about information in new ways; you remove the words and focus on the connections. Graphic organizers help students to clarify their thinking, are easily edited, and revised while adding a visual map.

Graphic organizers are a great teaching tool for the population of students that I work with. A graphic organizer can keep the students focused on their task, and enables them to add graphics, text, and hyperlinks which contribute to their understanding in outlining their assignments.

Retention of materials learned is apparent to me. Students are not merely copy and pasting their information; they are remembering. Everything is a contest in my class, as each student finishes an assignment, I hang it up for the other students to see, which provokes the rest of the students to want to do better. A graphic organizer allows them to see in variety of ways. They can turn a boring assignment into a fun assignment.

Below you will find links to some great teacher resources, and a list of some of my favorite graphic organizer tools:

"The Theory Underlying Concept Maps and How to Construct Them" is a great resource for teachers to understand the concepts of graphic organizers and to construct new knowledge for themselves. The tools of the 21st century can enhance your teaching, but until you understand the how and why, the tools are useless.

Teacher Tap provides many online tools and example lessons that can help students improve the way they take notes.

Inspiration Software is the essential tool students rely on to plan, research and complete projects successfully. With the integrated Diagram and Outline Views, they create graphic organizers and expand topics into writing.

Microsoft Office might be all you need when creating your graphic organizer, check out the link on Education World’s web page for complete a lesson plan.

Another great site for creating graphic organizers in Word is the “From Now On” at Educational Technology Journal.
I like the fact that you do not have to purchase any software or download programs into already slow computers.

University of Wisconsin at Stout has created a list of the 50 Uses for Inspiration® and Kidspiration. It has other links to projects to use with your students.

Connecting California's Classrooms to the World’s Teacher Activity Bank has a wealth of information and teacher created lessons.

WebQuest

A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented lesson format in which most or all the information that learners work with comes from the web. The model was developed by Bernie Dodge at San Diego State University in February, 1995 with early input from SDSU/Pacific Bell Fellow Tom March, the Educational Technology staff at San Diego Unified School District, and waves of participants each summer at the Teach the Teachers Consortium. Check out the many examples at Bernie Dodge’s Webquest Page.


Concept to Classroom The site features a series of FREE, self-paced workshops covering a wide variety of hot topics in education. The Series of Workshops provides educators with a wealth of information. With hundreds of teacher created Webquests, educators can integrate technology into their lesson planning.


Webquest 101 – Putting Discovery into your Curriculum is an online tutorial that introduces you to Webquests – an internet activity which lets you create something useful for your students while increasing your web "comfort level" at the same time. A well-designed webquest lets you turn your students loose on the web for a specific project and get results that both you and your students will like.


A Webquest can be created in Microsoft Word and easily transferred into a Power Point Presentation and saved as a web page; this step-by-step tutorial will lead you through the simple process of converting your electronic lesson plan from MS Word to MS PowerPoint. Once you have developed your lesson in PowerPoint, you will save as a website.


CourseLab is a powerful, yet easy-to-use, e-learning authoring tool that offers programming-free WYSIWYG environment for creating high-quality interactive e-learning content which can be published on the Internet, Learning Management Systems (LMS), CD-ROMS and other devices. And it is FREE! CourseLab PowerPoint Import Pack converts PowerPoint presentation into CourseLab slide sequence. Imported slides can be edited later just like usual slides.





Email Contact: denisemccall@carolina.rr.com

| BACK TO TOP |