Accommodations in an Online Environment
Reflect on your experiences with your students. Think of a situation in which online education may have been a preferable option for one of your special needs students or a student with an extenuating circumstance. If you do not have an example of a situation you have had as an educator, you may want to extend your thinking to your own experiences as a student, your own child’s experience, or choose a specific disability or special needs population you learned about earlier in this course.
Post in your blog: At least four well-developed paragraphs that address each of the four points:
Many years ago, I had a student who had a brain injury from an accident. As a result, he was blind. This provided the most challenging special education situation I had ever had. He was taking chemistry over the summer. This in and of itself provides a challenge because summer is so much faster than the regular school year. He was in rehab for his brain injury and they did not know if his sight would return. He had missed over a year of school already and was determined to get back on track despite his overwhelming circumstances.
The online environment was the only option for him because he spent much of his time in the hospital. Being able to work from a secondary location was the most important aspect of the online environment for this student. He also benefited from the flexibility of our schedule. If I remember correctly, he was given a modification which allowed me to customize his due dates to his rehab schedule. The other feature of online school that worked for him was that the material was all available for him to work ahead when he could around his schedule. The course describes this as the open book nature of the course. "A student is able to view their grade, their course content, recordings of lectures or feedback from the instructor, and view their schedule of assignments all from a click of the mouse". This feature was very appealing for this student. He also was able to utilize the read to speak feature to have the lessons read to him. While his mother was largely responsible for helping him navigate the course, the aspect did allow him some sense of independence.
The most challenging part for him was the aspects that required him to see the material. Written content was not an issue for him because he used used the software that would read to him. He was very smart and could easily understand and retain the information. The great challenges came from two types of material. One was the math and one was the visual models we used. It is very difficult to explain and do math without being able to see it. Fortunately, he was bright enough to be able to do some math in his head. For the rest, he would tell his mom what to type or write and she would do it on the calculator and tell him what it said.
For visual representations, I searched for resources that would provide descriptions of the models we were using. I suggested that his mother get him ball and stick models to represent atoms and allow him to feel them after his mother built samples of what she saw on screen.
In all honesty, I don't think that our platform is written to address visual impairments of this degree. He was a special circumstance. Without his mother's help navigating the course and typing his answers, this would not have been an option for him. It was an eye opening situation and an inspiring situation! He was an amazing young man.
Post in your blog: At least four well-developed paragraphs that address each of the four points:
- Describe student’s disability, special need and/or the extenuating circumstance, without including personally identifiable information.
- Identify at least three specific aspects of the online environment you feel would be beneficial for this student’s situation or disability.
- Explain why each aspect of the online environment you identified above would be advantageous to your student, using specific examples.
- What challenges do you suspect your student may encounter in the online environment?
Many years ago, I had a student who had a brain injury from an accident. As a result, he was blind. This provided the most challenging special education situation I had ever had. He was taking chemistry over the summer. This in and of itself provides a challenge because summer is so much faster than the regular school year. He was in rehab for his brain injury and they did not know if his sight would return. He had missed over a year of school already and was determined to get back on track despite his overwhelming circumstances.
The online environment was the only option for him because he spent much of his time in the hospital. Being able to work from a secondary location was the most important aspect of the online environment for this student. He also benefited from the flexibility of our schedule. If I remember correctly, he was given a modification which allowed me to customize his due dates to his rehab schedule. The other feature of online school that worked for him was that the material was all available for him to work ahead when he could around his schedule. The course describes this as the open book nature of the course. "A student is able to view their grade, their course content, recordings of lectures or feedback from the instructor, and view their schedule of assignments all from a click of the mouse". This feature was very appealing for this student. He also was able to utilize the read to speak feature to have the lessons read to him. While his mother was largely responsible for helping him navigate the course, the aspect did allow him some sense of independence.
The most challenging part for him was the aspects that required him to see the material. Written content was not an issue for him because he used used the software that would read to him. He was very smart and could easily understand and retain the information. The great challenges came from two types of material. One was the math and one was the visual models we used. It is very difficult to explain and do math without being able to see it. Fortunately, he was bright enough to be able to do some math in his head. For the rest, he would tell his mom what to type or write and she would do it on the calculator and tell him what it said.
For visual representations, I searched for resources that would provide descriptions of the models we were using. I suggested that his mother get him ball and stick models to represent atoms and allow him to feel them after his mother built samples of what she saw on screen.
In all honesty, I don't think that our platform is written to address visual impairments of this degree. He was a special circumstance. Without his mother's help navigating the course and typing his answers, this would not have been an option for him. It was an eye opening situation and an inspiring situation! He was an amazing young man.