Help me give my students laptops. Due to our extremely unique population at our school, each student having their own computer would change the way each student goes about their day at school.
Our school is a very unique one in the Buffalo Public School System and those around the area. We serve students with moderate to severe disabilities and offer a wide range of services that include therapies and academic instruction modified to the New York State Alternate Assessment.
Some of our students require adaptive equipment such as wheelchairs, communication devices, therapy equipment, health related services and much more.
The more accessible materials are for our students, the more successful they are.
My Project
This year in 12th grade, my class has started a brand new keyboarding program that gets my students working on their typing skills. One of the unique aspects about my students and all students at our school is that each student gets to attend school and get an education until they turn 21. With this being said, the older they get, the more we as teachers focus on different vocational tasks and life skills that will prepare them for the next chapter in their lives. Every day my students, half of them in wheelchairs, go down to the computer lab and set up a desktop computer. While this is great that we have access to the lab, it is very time consuming and not ideal for the spacing and adaptions that our students need. With a classroom set of computers each student would be able to modify the set up to their needs and save time to be more productive on a daily basis
On top of working on a new keyboarding program, our curriculum is specifically run through online websites; Time for Kids, Scholastic News, Unique Learning, News-2-You are some of the materials that we use on a regular basis.
Since students do not have laptops, I bring up the lesson on the whiteboard and students follow along from their seats. In each program there is an option to allow student permission where they can pull the lesson up on a personal device and follow along right in front of them. This would be especially beneficial to some of the students in my classroom that have visual impairments. It would also allow each student to work on the skill of browsing the computer and managing their device, which is something that may be needed in a future job or work.
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