accessibility

As a teacher, one of the biggest challenges you may face is finding ways to support English Language Learners in your classroom. While it can be difficult to meet the diverse needs of these students, one powerful resource that you may want to consider is Discovery Education. Discovery Education is an online platform that provides a wealth of resources and tools to support students’ learning. This platform can be particularly helpful for our EL population, as it offers a range of features that can help build background knowledge, support vocabulary development, and strategies to help students meet content objectives. Building...

The iPad has some awesome features you may didn’t know even existed! Annotating within safari reader, powerful accessibility features, Apple Classroom hidden features, the split screen superpower, and upgrading your home screen with widgets.

Podcasting is increasingly becoming popular for all ages due to the ease and free approach of access. It’s not surprising there are podcasts for every topic under the sun. Flip makes it easy to provide opportunities for students to record, edit, share, and listen to their classmates.

Seesaw is an amazing place to include student writing. When thinking about writing lessons, we need to keep in mind that writing involves not only putting thoughts and ideas into words in written form, but also knowing & using the appropriate vocabulary, spelling, and grammar to convey meaning, knowing and using the appropriate form for the type of writing, and the difference between formal and informal writing. It also includes the skills of revising, editing, and publishing. 

The language domains, listening, speaking, reading, and writing, are the 4 ways that people can interact with language. Two of these skills, speaking and writing, are described as productive skills as we create language with each of these. The other two skills, listening and reading, are receptive skills because we use these skills to receive information from an outside source. In this post, we will focus on ways that you can practice the language domain of reading by using Seesaw.

We talk about accessible learning in our department possibly daily. It comes up in almost every conversation we have. Despite this, the one thing we’ve never said about accessible learning is that it’s easy because frankly, it isn’t. Ensuring that all of your students, regardless of ability and language, have the same level of access to content is a huge challenge for a teacher. One free tool for teachers that can help to bridge that gap is Epic.  Epic is a freemium tool (keep an eye out for the “🔒Unlimited” books that are not available with the free account) that...

The language domains, listening, speaking, reading, and writing, are the 4 ways that people can interact with language. Two of these skills, speaking and writing, are described as productive skills as we create language with each of these. The other two skills, listening and reading, are receptive skills because we use these skills to receive information from an outside source.  In this post, we will focus on practicing the language domain of speaking and how Seesaw can help you meet this need.

At Elkhart Community Schools, we have a surprisingly large population of English Language Learners for a small midwest town. Because of this, we have to be very intentional about planning for and utilizing the four language domains to help boost understanding of the English language when providing content to students. In this post, we will focus on practicing the language domain of listening and how we can use Seesaw to help support this domain.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, now is the time. This past semester, Seesaw released a new *game-changing* feature, Seesaw Groups. Seesaw groups allow you to assign student work to groups of students with one click.  Creating and Assigning to Seesaw Groups Seesaw groups are also super easy to create. From your Seesaw homepage, select the wrench in the top right corner. Under students > Manage Student Groups > Type in a name for the student group > Add Student Group. From there, you can select the students you want in that group, then select the green check mark...

Earlier this week I stumbled upon a podcast called Equipping ELL’s with Beth Vaucher. One episode that really caught my attention was “4 Ways to Easily Cover All 4 Domains Through a Read Aloud”. Beth walks through how to actively engage your students in all four of the language domains using just one read aloud. This post is based on the ideas that she shared in her podcast. Check out this episode, below! Why Use Read Alouds There are many evidence-based benefits of reading aloud to students. Reading aloud creates a classroom community by establishing a text known by the entire...

Ensuring all students are successful at learning content in your classroom starts with lesson preparation. The SIOP component of Lesson Preparation sets the tone for the entire SIOP framework. In this blog post, we will highlight two features of lesson preparation: choosing appropriate content concepts for both age and educational backgrounds and adapting content to all levels of student proficiency, and look at how these two features work hand in hand and when planned for effectively, can change the trajectory of your classroom. In specific, we will focus on different methods you can use to adapt texts so that you...

Graphic organizers are an amazing way to adapt content to meet the needs of all of your learners. In this blog post, we will highlight using graphic organizers to help support the lesson preparation feature of adapting content to all levels of student proficiency.  Graphic organizers are a great tool that provides students with visual clues to help support text and language that is challenging to understand. They can be used before, during, or after reading.  Graphic organizers can also be used specifically for specific subjects and content areas.  Seesaw UsersIf you are looking for activities that have graphic organizers,...

What I truly love about Apple and the iPad is their dedication to accessibility. (You can learn more, here). Below I present to you my top 5 iPad accessibility tips for the iPad! Tip #1: Enable dictation (it isn’t cheating) Dictation allows students to use the microphone to use their voice to type. This is POWERFUL for many students, and while it may feel a bit like cheating, I promise you that it isn’t. To turn on dictation, Settings > Keyboards > Enable dictation towards the bottom. Tip #2: Speak Screen and Speak Selection (this also isn’t cheating) Speak Selection...