Teaching Students' The Way They Were Meant To Be Taught

My classmates have been discussing playing favorites in our schools. With all of us there seems to be a few students or a student in each of the classes we are in who really want our attention whether its academic need or not. It’s hard when you think of having students with special needs in your classroom especially if you aren't provided with help, which is a lot of teachers who I have observed, are dealings with. I have already mentioned in a previous blog that I see the benefits of technology to use with students with special needs, March 23rd, this student's work was just as impressive or more impressive then his classmates work. Talking with my classmates we were concerned with taking too much of our time to direct instruction to those with special needs and feel sometimes we are taking away instruction from the other students. But Last Monday we were exposed to a pretty great virtual Monday with Karen Janowski. She really believes in Universal Learning Design, which is learning to teach all students no matter what their disability. She gave us so many resources and more importantly free resources to help our students with. These tools like the enlarged tool bar and color-coordinated writing that can be added in Microsoft Word allow all of our students to be on a level playing field when using the computer. These students can be doing the same project with adaptations to help their learning style that allows classroom instruction and assignments to be fair to all students regardless of their disability. These tools will be great like a tool that creates flash cards, speech to text, and many more free tools. I learned from her presentation that helping the students that need help more help is not about playing favorites its about helping a student learn.