Sunday, October 11, 2009
Voice Thread
Wow! What a wonderful technological tool. By for this is my favorite new technology yet. I plan to use this many time in my Science classroom to document students authentically engaged in the scientific process. I believe that my students' engagement will immediately be impacted by this new tool. This seems to be easier to create for each of my classes than wiki or a podcast. Fun social learning tool. So here is my voice thread, I hope that you can help me get a fresh insight on my situation.http://voicethread.com/share/661788/
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My understanding of co-teaching is that the regular education teacher is presenting a lesson, and the co-teacher is in support of that lesson with everyone, so that inclusion is not pronounced, or the students with IEP's are not drawn out. In my experience the regular ed teacher is certified in that field and the co-teacher had special education certification, but they worked with all the students in order to achieve that balance. I do not know if that is your situation or not. I think co-planning is a key as you say, and I might add that I have seen a similar situation that just did not work. The regular education teacher pitched everything and the co-teacher arrived late, sometimes singled out "her" students by pulling them out of the room altogether and working with one or two in her resource room. That is not inclusion, nor is cooperative. You may want to try going the route of pairing/grouping stronger students with the less strong and have them work on projects together. The voice thread may work for your sighted students to include your visually challenged by having them use descriptions of the photos for that person to guess. I empathize with you as it seems to be a tough situation to be faced with. I had a similar situation with a student who could only list, she could not write, speak, and was in a wheelchair. She didn't even have functional use of writing with her hands. So I had to adapt everything in order to have her work on more real life skills. We worked on memorization, map reading, reading newspaper articles, exploring skills for challenged individuals. It was tough and I really can not say I was successful, but we got through it and she is now a senior. I wished I had a better answer for you because your class looks like a very dynamic group. Maybe you could have your students create VoiceThreads too, and have your co-teacher help with each group. I try to think back to front. What do I want my kids to produce, then try to find what may fit. Are they going to write a paper, complete a webquest, create a newspaper article, produce a commercial to tape, use the Publisher program to create a travel brochure, etc.... I am not as creative as I would like so I just keep trying to find things that work for me, then turn it over to them and see what they come up with. I hope you can work things out.
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