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<span style=”color: #163c42; font-family: ‘Hind Madurai’, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;”>Consider how you will plan and prepare for a blended/hybrid learning approach post pandemic? Please refer to the School Development Planning section in the Inclusive Education Framework.</span><br style=”box-sizing: inherit; color: #163c42; font-family: ‘Hind Madurai’, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;” /><span style=”color: #163c42; font-family: ‘Hind Madurai’, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;”>Post your response (150 words minimum) as a reply to this post .</span>
The knowledge that I have gained over this past week on AT has really brought home the importance of a hybrid approach to education in order to better meet the needs of individual students – a hybrid approach better facilitates supporting each child where they are at so that their individual learning needs are targeted and met.
I was very much struck by the idea of the Flipped Classroom – a concept which I had not been aware of previous to this course. Watching the 60 minute programme on The Khan Academy gave a great insight into this model and how effective it can be – it really seems like a new and dynamic approach to teaching in the 21st century and one can see how valuable it might be as a teaching tool; it really allows the teacher to work with the student on a more targeted individual basis. I also think it makes so much sense that more of the hands on, problem solving aspect of teaching happens in school while the provision of information on topic by the teacher is read/worked on by the student at home giving them the opportunity to read back and pick up information at their own pace.
As SET teacher to 1st class this year, taking one specific example, I could see benefit in sending videos home on Seesaw where I explain how to break up words into syllables (starting with two syllable closed vowel words); I would give outline on how to approach, and examples on the home video and then the focus in school on Word Study would be on hands on – breaking up different words and seeing if children have understanding of how to do this.
One of the big advantages of this hybrid approach is that it also gives parents an insight into how to help their child. In our current model we teach in school and really give exercises to test understanding at home; if child lacks understanding the parent may be at sea as to how to help with homeword as they have not seen how we have taught, in this example, how to read closed syllable words. With this hybrid approach they would see the teaching and so can better help the child and have a better sense of how their child is getting on with their learning. During the Pandemic, we made a start on this approach with Seesaw and I think in many ways it helped me to better connect with parents of my SET children and definitely my videos meant that parents had a better sense of what I am doing in school with their children – the pace of work and how I approached my work.
This is just one example of how hybrid learning might work in my SET room next year; I would encourage the class teacher to adopt similar approach to Word Study as we would work on this in our Station Teaching so my videos could be shared with the whole class and the real hands on problem solving around words would happen in-class.
As I have mentioned throughout I am very taken with the benefits of Immersive Reader and Dictate and see these as part of my approach to teaching and learning next year also.
The flipped Classroom and Immersive Reader/Dictate will be my starting points for AT as a tool for hybrid learning; bit by bit I will hope to use more and more of my learning from this course over the coming year and years.
It is important that this hybrid learning approach becomes part of the School Development Plan. I would definitely recommend this course to my principal and colleagues so that there is a whole school approach to same. The Framework emphasizes the importance of addressing the individual needs of pupils and not adopting a ‘one size fits all’. I hope what I’ve outlined above gives a sense of how I will start to change my approach next year and look at meeting needs of each child individually so that their potential is best met. I will work closely with my 1st class mainstream teachers and hopefully if they see the benefits also it will be a good way to encourage this approach throughout the school so that it becomes part of our policy framework.
Currently our SSE focus is on the area of spelling and more broadly looking at how a Word Study Approach might benefit spelling, vocabulary development and comprehension simultaneously. Within Immersive Reader, the ability to break words into syllables would be helpful in this regard. Other strategies which I use within the classroom context is to just get children to find the vowel within each syllable of a word and to indicate whether that vowel is long or short. Multi-syllabic words can often cause difficulty for children as they do not spell through the whole word, they can tend to guess as they proceed. Encouraging children to identify the vowel in each syllable teaches them to be more accurate when working through a word. Explicit teaching around word parts – prefixes, suffixes and base or root words also gets children to see words as the sum of a number of parts.
With regard to how I will implement and use AT going forward, I’m really excited about bringing ideas from what I’ve learned over this past week into my SET classroom next year. In this specific module, I’ve seen lots of new apps which could be very useful as tools to engage my learners with literacy difficulties; I’m teaching 1st class students and really like the look of Literactive and Learning Alley Audiobooks. I need more time to look further at the list of literacy and numeracy apps.
With regard to older learners, I will definitely be recommending some of these apps to my colleagues, and after watching the 60 minutes video, the Khan Academy could be a really helpful AT tool for some of our older children who are struggling with maths.
From Day 1 of this course, Immersive Reader and Dictate seem like game changers and I am excited at the opportunity to try these out.
Finally, for my children with autism and social difficulties, I am excited to try the Kloog App recommended at the start of the app section.
PART 2 The principles of Cosán are sound – a framework giving ‘teachers autonomy to plan their professional learning to take account of their changing needs and those of their pupils/students. At the core of this is critical thinking and reflection by teachers around their teaching and learning so that they are open to developing their skills and moving in different directions around teaching and learning where such new approaches are evidence-based.
Teaching and Learning should be a lifelong process for teachers – we will never know it all; we are continually striving to just be better and do the best that we can for our pupils;
Cosán incorporates many areas outside of literacy and numeracy such as inclusion, well-being and ICT – it is vital that our CPD is rounded. As an example, educating teachers and students around their emotional well-being is vital to ensure learning can take place in other areas, such as literacy and numeracy for example. Understanding that we are the sum of many different parts is critical to ensure a rounded teaching and learning experience.
The diagram really outlines the key elements very well – I have printed this off and will put it up in my own room on return as it will be good to check in and ensure that rounded learning is taking place; to ensure that I am addressing the different areas of learning throughout my CPD – continued professional growth and practice, commitment to quality teaching and learning.
PART 1
I will be teaching 1st class children next year in my role as SET. I am moving forward with them as I taught these children last year in Senior Infants.
One particular child would benefit hugely from the Dictate function on IPAD or word. He has a diagnosis of DCD and really struggles with attending to written work for any period of time. However he is extremely creative and is always verbalizing stories but never wanting to put them in writing due to the physical effort involved. Dicatate would provide the opportunity for him to put his stories down on paper and really get an opportunity to address his creative language side. For this child Immersive Reader is not necessary as he is an excellent reader but the opportunity to edit and self-correct would also be available to him and by using Dictate function it would be possible to develop the skill without having to put pencil to paper. I really think this would engage this pupil and provides a real opportunity to separate out the teaching of the physical act of writing (which I will continue to address and work on) from the creative writing process – too often children with DCD etc expend so much energy on the physical aspects of writing that their creative skills are not tapped into or are severely restrained.
Another really useful module; these AT devices are all new to me and something which I will bring back to school – while I can see lots of uses for the age group I will be working with in SET next year (1st class), I think further up the school, some of these tools could be game changers for the children.
Immersive Reader: Overall this just seems to be a fabulous tool, from being able to highlight different amounts of text, change size, text colour, background colour, break words into syllables, highlight parts of speech, the scope is just endless. Also, the read text facility is fantastic. I also love, love the fact that using One Lens, I can just photograph a page of a reader for example and Immersive Text will automatically pick up the text when saved to One Note etc. A real time saver for the teacher in helping to differentiate for each particular student.
Dictate – another wonderful feature; I have noticed the microphone up in the Toolbars but have never known how to use it. A wonderful tool for children, allowing them to concentrate on creative writing without having to be limited by any physical writing difficulties.
Sharepoint – I need to look further into this to fully understand how I could best use this and to get a better sense of where Sharepoint might fit into Power point or whether they are very much separate stand alone tools. But quite clearly, its a useful tool to break down and provide information to students that they can then use at home to understand and review work covered in school.
So much to take in from these modules – but all really good, interesting stuff. Really delighted I signed up for this course – had no expectation that there would be so much AT out there.
Having worked in SET for the last 4 years, I felt this would be a good course to do to look at developing a better understanding of AT and how they can develop my teaching tools so that I can better facilitate the teaching and learning of each child that I am working with.
In this first module alone, my eyes have really been opened to the scope of AT and resources that are out there; I also am mindful of how under-utilised they are by me currently! – I see a lot of potential for me to upskill here and better support my students…..a lot of new and useful information to take on herer.
I guess however it is good to be reminded that many of the resources which we currently use e.g. visual timetables, magnetic letters, adaptive papers, pens, audio books, adapted seating, fall under the remit of AT – albeit low to medium tech.
With regard to the potential of AT, I see great potential with many of the Microsoft Tools which were highlighted in this section, in particular the Immersive Reader with it’s varied functionalities – Dictation Function, layout, spacing, colour, grammar adaptations for syllables, reading preferences etc. It will be particularly helpful to work on Reading Fluency using the Immersive Reader, being able to take photos of a particular page and set this as reading which a child can work on. I really love the ability to break the words down into syllables also for the reader through the Immersive Reader Tool. I’m a big advocate of a Structured Literacy Approach to reading so think this facility for children to decode words independently into syllables and then be in a position to check these words through the Immersive Reader is brilliant. The Educator Center in Microsoft (something I wasn’t previously aware of) is an amazing resource. I will have to give it more time to become fully familiar with the tools but can really see myself using these next year.
SSE – sharing of knowledge gained through courses such as this and a thorough review of the DLF should allow a school to start on the process of developing their DL plan. Working on this during Croke Park and setting time aside to look at the Microsoft Education Center would be time well spent.
Obviously, many of the Standards in the DLF will be applied, but one that really stands out to me is
The teacher selects and uses teaching approaches appropriate to the learning objective and to pupils’ learning needs.
With appropriate use of AT such as the Immersive Reader, where a child struggles with reading, but the focus of a particular lesson is comprehension questions or to write a summary of a particular passage, the immersive Reader could be used to assist the child with reading the text so that they can then focus on the task is hand, which is primarily related to and focused on assessing and developing their writing.
