Technology for Special Education
Accessing Ability: Access to General Curriculum Tech Ideas
Pic Collage
Pic Collage is an amazing "free" app available for IOS devices. It's fast, fun and one of the best ways to create awesome collages, directions, content info, posters, and images for slides using a variety of photos, stickers, backgrounds, text, web images and freeform cutouts. Such a huge variety of applications from the teachers perspective and the students!
Just a Few Ideas...
Vocab/Content
Easily present vocabulary or content for instruction or have students demonstrate understanding...
Procedures
Provide valuable visuals for step by step tasks or instructions. Also great for teaching procedures or steps needed to solve a problem. Could be used for sequencing or time lines too!
Visual Notes
Instead of presenting long notes or having students demonstrate knowledge through worksheet based tasks, use pic collage to visually organize ideas, concepts and important information.
More Examples
Skitch
This drawing application allows you to take a photograph or screenshot and write directly on it. You can use shapes, arrows, sketches and text annotation to get your point across. You are capable of marking up photos, screenshots, maps, and web pages and share them with anyone you like. You can also use it more like a whiteboard as a drawing tool. Students will be able to share sketches and annotations over Twitter and e-mail. Skitch is available on most devices.
Classroom Ideas
- Math: You can use this app like a whiteboard to practice computational skills, solve word problems, and draw geometric shapes and label vertices, or even better make a students find real life examples of math concepts and solve on top of their images.
- Science: You can use this app like a whiteboard to draw life cycles, draw molecules or annotate photos to label parts of a plant, or create diagrams for food chain.
- Language Arts: The text annotation can be used for fictional or informative writing assignments. The whiteboard can be used for word study in terms of learning syllabication, prefixes and suffixes or sight words. Create various types of concept maps or diagrams.
- Geography: Skitch allows you to identify a point of interest on a map. Students can point out objects and locations within a photo. This app also has a world map that you can crop to show regions. You are able to locate a region on the map during discussions to see where it was located in relation to where we were.
- ELL: Use photos and label to help English Language Learners become familiar with common English vocabulary.
Catherine Wilson
Educational Specialist
Access to General Curriculum
Email: clearlycat@gmail.com
Location: Portland, OR, United States
Phone: 713-291-8180