Reflection #8 – Week 10

This week, we were talking a lot about accessibility within schools and school districts. We watched a couple videos about accessibility. The first video that we watched was about what accessibility is and looks like from the perspective of people who are most affected by it. They described that accessibility isn’t just for people who are physically disabled, but also for those that are deaf, blind, autistic, or those that have any other disability. Accessibility can look like ramps, but also braille, audio instructions, sensory supports, and more. The second video that we watched was about accessibility in the classroom from the perspective of a teacher. Some examples that the video gave were text-to-speech and read-alouds. It talked about how accessibility supports diverse learners, provides them with independence, and gets them excited to come to school. Having supports available for students also motivates them to try doing tasks in different ways, increases their motivation and success, and supports continuity of learning and doing tasks. They also mentioned that most resources are already installed on school devices, otherwise they are easy to get.

Next, we moved onto learning about SET BC and ARC BC. SET BC provides various tools that support physical, visual, and auditory needs. Their goal is to provide people with disabilities with a sense of belonging and purpose. On their site, they also have training/coaching available for people in order to make learning environments as inclusive as possible. They do this through working with students and school staff, as well as parents and guardians. ARC BC provides supports and resources for students with learning, visual, and physical disabilities. They work with students and school staff to provide students with materials that they need, but may not already have, in order for them to be successful in their schooling. After learning about these two resources, we were given a Padlet activity in groups where we got to learn more about ARC BC, SET BC, and some of the supports that are available for students in the schools that we will be doing our practicums in. I got the opportunity to research more about the supports that are available in SD61, the school district that I went through for the majority of my schooling, and the district that I am doing my practicum in. It was interesting to see how many people work behind the scenes to make sure that all students are as successful and included as possible. The SD61 website claimed that every school has learning support teachers, school-based teams (group of staff that work together to solve problems and find solutions), school, youth, and family counsellors, and educational assistants. Some other supports that are available in the district are school psychologists, pathologists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, itinerant teachers (supporting visually and hearing impaired students), nursing support, and settlement workers (supporting students that are new to Canada). All of these people are within the district, but move between schools as needed. I remember all of the in-school supports from when I was in school and seeing my peers with them. However, I don’t remember seeing any of the district people very often. I remember an itinerant teacher was present in my high school to support a blind student in my grade, otherwise, I don’t recall many other supports. Although, a lot of these people are likely to have more private consultations with individual students and staff (potentially for privacy reasons), so they may have been around without me knowing. We ended off this section of class by talking about district checks and how you should check a district’s privacy policy, digital literacy information, AI use policy, and what digital apps are available.

The next thing we looked at was the K-12 Evaluated Resource Collection on Focused Ed. This resource collection provides staff with digital resources and books that are appropriate, accessible, and inclusive which they can use in their classrooms. You can search by title, collection/topic, grade level, and subject to find resources where it will tell you about the resource as well as give an evaluation of it looking at different elements and the resource’s quality.

For the last part of the class we went back to talk a bit more about gamified learning where we discussed Prodigy. Prodigy is a game that I had heard of a lot before but never played myself, so I was interested to learn more. It is a free game that has different character, challenges, and more. There is the ability for teachers to monitor student progress on the game as there is a teacher dashboard within it. There are two versions of the game within it. One of them is a school version where there isn’t as much available to students. This is because there are some locked sections that the teacher can choose when and what to make available. The second version is an at-home version that has everything available to students so that they can play outside of school as well. Many students love the game and can even get a bit addicted to it. Some cons associated with it is that there can be some aggressive up-selling (especially in the home version), and limited educational depth as there is much more play than math in the game. We also touched on Mathletics which is another commonly used game that has a better incorporation and balance of math and play than Prodigy does. We finished the class by watching a short video on Classroomscreen to follow up on our discussion about it in the previous class.