Apps for Non-Verbal Students

The Tech & Learning Advisor Blog piece by Vicki Windman, Best Speech and Language Apps, offers suggestions for iPad apps, which will help students who are unable to speak, have speech disorders and/or have other communication problems. The apps are available at prices from $4.99 to $99.99. Examples of the apps are:  Avaz for Autism, with picture and text options; Speech Flipbook, designed to help children with Apraxia (problems saying what they want to say), and those who have difficulty with articulation, phonological awareness, and reading; and Is That Silly?, which helps children understand spoken and written word meanings.  Other apps appropriate for students with speech and language disorders include: URtalker Pro, Voice4u, and Speech Therapy Apraxia Words. All of these apps can be customized for specific student needs

Connect Globally through ePals

Students love to connect with other students for global learning projects, but sometimes it’s difficult to find the perfect collaboration partner. You might want to look into ePals, since it could be called the standard when it comes to global communication. It’s easy to get started with global projects with ePals. All you have to do is to fill in the form, and you are ready to use this free global learning community. You’ll get help finding classroom matches according to the language you wish to use (English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, or Chinese) and the age level of your students (1-7, 8-10, 11-13, 13-16, and 17+). You can create your own collaborative project or join projects started by other teachers and students. ePals’ Schoolsafe eMail, Web 2.0 tools, and resources are available to help you and your students connect and interact with other classes around the world.  ePals sponsors and partners include National Geographic, the Smithsonian, and Cobblestone & Cricket magazine. To learn more about ePals, watch the video available on the ePals opening page.

Are Some Parents Misguided Advocates?

Dr. Allen Mendler’s “Rethinking Difficult Parents”, in edutopia, describes parents that teachers encounter and wish they hadn’t. We’ve all heard parents protect their children by saying: “My daughter would never lie.”, “My son doesn’t have a temper.”, “Why wasn’t everyone disciplined?”, and “My child has a personality conflict with that teacher.” Dr. Mendler tells us that these parents are being advocates for their children and that what they really want is to feel that teachers care about their children. In the article, the author give ideas for how to talk with parents who are very upset, how to learn more about their children from them, how to keep the focus on the parents’ child even when the parents may try to bring others into the conversation, how to show appreciation for parents’ suggestions, and how to include positive input along with the problems being discussed. Most of all, when faced with a difficult or angry parent, give the parents time to explain what is bothering them without being defensive or interrupting their dialog. Listening can ease many difficult situations and, when things calm down, give teachers the opportunity to thank the parents for the suggestions and establish what is possible for the future.

Handy Social Media Commandments

You'll want to take a look at these social media commandmentsfrom Leaderswest: Fresh Perspectives on Social Media & Technology. Included are many suggestions I'm sure you already know, but reviewing the ideas with your students is wise. As always, it’s important to keep up a conversation with your students about their use of online networking and to stress use of common sense.

Help Students Learn to Speak Up for Their Future

Learning to speak well before audiences is a skill that will serve students well as they move through high school and college and into their careers. Accomplished speakers understand how to handle college and job interviews, will be ready to give dynamic class presentations, and know how to pursue leadership opportunities throughout their lives.

The Speech and Debate Honor Society, National Forensic League, is dedicated to sparking community, insight, recognition, leadership, and success among students. The League has resources and professional development opportunities available to help schools get involved in its interscholastic contests for speech and debate. Optimist International is another organization that promotes excellence in public speaking. Each year, local Optimist clubs invite students in their region to compete (usually in the months of March and April) by giving four to five minute speeches on a specific topic. Winning students receive local, district, and state awards.

How to Transform Our Classrooms

We educators have ideas about how education might be improved, but achieving our dreams for our schools, especially considering the cutbacks in budgets, seems impossible. Technology is surely changing our schools, but are we able to guide what is happening or are we simply struggling to keep up? THE Journal offers the White Paper, The Trifecta for Transforming Education, which offers an approach to change that “addresses the complexities of both technology and Curriculum. “ It also tackles myths such as: “Tablets are the ultimate PC today,” “Consumerization transforms everything easily,” and “Education and learning is primarily done at home.” You can download this free 8-page paper on the THE Journal site.

Texting Parents

Lisa Neilsen, in SmartBlog on Education, gives us four ideas for connecting with parents through texting. These include use of services such as Remind101, Mobile Commons, ClassPager, Twitter, and Poll Everywhere. Remind101 and Mobile Commons are for mass messaging and are perfect for alerting parents about school closures and scheduled events. Messaging through ClassPager can be used for messaging to students and parents for homework, links to resources, and notices. Even if parents have not joined Twitter, they can receive tweets by following their children’s school and/or teacher messages. Poll everywhere is one of the “voting systems” you can use to survey parents’ opinions/ideas about school events, curricular offerings, summer reading, and/or other input you may want from parents. Neilsen’s blog entry gives links to the services and to selected schools that have put the services to work.

Okay, Let’s Redesign Our Schools

As long as I’ve been in education, and that’s been a very long time, I’ve heard educational leaders talk of reform. There was new math, schools without walls, stations, core curriculum, carpet curriculum—you name it. We talked about reform with the emergence of desktop computers in the classroom, and then with interactive whiteboards, and now with mobile digital devices. The educational potential of mobile devices and the trend for young people to attach themselves to them (although not always for what we might call educational endeavors), appears to offer a greater opportunity for us to finally make some changes. We can’t, however, see iPads and other devices as the answer unless we consider why we adhere to methods, curricula, assessments, and classroom and school organizations, which don’t work for all of our students.

Glenn Kleiman, Executive Director for Educational Innovation and Professor, NC State University College of Education offers some excellent ideas about what we need to consider in order to meet the needs of our students. His eight Essential Elements close with the reminder: “No matter how powerful our technologies become, they will never resolve the difficult, classical issues of education. . . .”

Hurricane Sandy & Internet Connectivity

We know what it’s like when the Internet goes down. It’s then that we realize just how dependent we are upon this resource in our schools, homes, communities, and businesses. When Hurricane Sandy devastated the East Coast, many Internet systems came to a halt. According to Will Knight in the MIT Technology Review, when 10% of the networks in the New York area are not available, it’s “like taking out an entire country the size of Austria, in terms of impact on the global routing table.” With your students, take a look at the video of how the networks were silenced during the days of Hurricane Sandy and have them consider what this means in terms of communications, quality of life, and vulnerability.

Texting Awareness

Danielle Veo wanted to find a unique way to raise funds for the hospital that is helping her 11-year-old sister, who is suffering from a rare immune disorder. She came up with the idea to call for a NO TEXTING DAY. Although Danielle created the day as a fundraiser, she realized that such a day would help everyone put down their phones and spend time talking face-to-face.  She’s hoping people will be inspired to get going with more direct communication.  After reading about Danielle’s project, I checked online to see what others were doing to bring awareness to problems related to texting like lack of direct conversation, texting during class, texting while driving, and obsessive texting. There are pledges to be signed, videos showing the dangers of texting, studies on excessive texting, and texting guidelines. Not much seems to be working, since today, teens are texting more than ever. The average is reported to be about 60 texts per day, with girls sending more messages than boys.