Assistive Technology

I am really enjoying creating my classroom book on power point as a form of assistive technology. My target student has a speech disability, so hearing the book read will be very valuable to him.  I also have many ESL students (half of my class), so hearing the book will be good for their reading comprehension as well. There is a website that we use often in class, http://www.starfall.com which has a number of books and a narrator reads them out loud. We have been using this website all year, and it has improved reading comprehension for the ESL students. I chose the book "Hey! Wake Up!" by Sandra Boynton, and have added sound to it. This is a personal favorite of my son at 21 months old, and my daughter loved it at that age as well.

I use other forms of assistive technology in class daily. Everything is labeled, and the word wall has pictures along with the words. The classroom rules are posted with pictures of the expected behaviors. I have also implemented the task analysis for shoe tying, and I intend to place other of these task analysis boards throughout the classroom to show expected behaviors. I intend to create one on table manners, as this is a real issue in the classroom. Our Speech Pathologist who comes in once a week to work with the three students with IEPs uses her iPad for assistive technology, to repeat words so that the students can have instant feedback about how they are pronouncing the words and can correct themselves. She also has a number of "games" on the iPad for speech correction. I feel I have a clear idea of how to implement assistive technology so that it is useful to my students in the classroom.