Desmos
THREE APPS TO SUPPORT S T U D E N TS W I T H S P E C I A L N E E D S This article originally appeared on Achieve the Core, in partnership with Student Achievement Partners and later on NEAToday.org. The following app suggestions are compiled by Dr. Bryan R. Drost the Director of Curriculum and Instruction for the ESC of Summit County. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish Education from Hiram College, a Master’s of Education in Educational Foundations with an emphasis in Standards-Based instruction, as well as a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with an emphasis in assessment from Kent State University. Here are his recommendations, in his own words.
Often, students with special needs who are struggling in math need some type of visual to represent mathematical relationships. When this isn’t provided, these students will shut down and become frustrated. To be frank, many of us need those visuals. In addition to providing just such a visual, Desmos harnesses the social nature of online interactions into meaningful math inquiry. For example, by using the Function Carnival tool, students are given the freedom to experiment with functions and are given direct feedback that allows them to revise their thinking and improve their mathematical practices AND practice perseverance as they iterate and work their way to the correct solution. Lastly, and most powerfully, this tool gives teachers the ability to randomly pair students with electronic devices, allowing students to create questions and challenges for each other based on aligned content. This can help students with special needs as it provides a model for mathematical thinking. Check it out at https://teacher.desmos.com/.
TextTeaser
The last of my recommended apps is really one that can be used in all disciplines, and isn’t limited to math or ELA. As students progress into higher and higher grade levels or as content gets more and more challenging, it is essential to help students see the relationships between ideas. Often, students with special needs, who have difficulty with organizing information, need support in keeping ideas and these relationships straight. Ideament is a great application that allows you to draw a diagram—a mini map, concept map, flow chart, etc.—and convert it to a text outline, and vice versa. This is a great way to help students with special needs organize information for something that they need to write. It can also be used in relationship to the text itself. For example, copying and pasting a portion of text into a Word document will allow the software to create a diagram of the text to help students organize this text and make sense of the relationships amongst ideas, perhaps say, in a science text. Students also have the option of manipulating these diagrams to reorganize them in ways that are uniquely suited for how they learn to process the information.
One of the concerns with some special needs students is that they can’t read the complex text that is required of them at grade level. Research has consistently proven that we need to make sure kids get exposure and regular practice with grade-level text. Simply giving students texts that are not at their Lexile level is problematic, so what can teachers do to ensure access to complex texts for all readers? Try one of these free Google tools! Take an on-grade-level text, maybe from Newsela. Download the free TextTeaser Google Chrome extension (it’s available for other browsers as well—just do a quick web search). TextTeaser summarizes the content from a webpage as a list of sentences or in paragraph form. What’s really great is that you adjust the output using a slider to give different detail levels of the passage or article. An intervention specialist can work in a small group or one-on-one, helping the students make sense of the larger passage. The summary can be used to preview the text or as a refresher to allow students to access the content, main ideas, and vocabulary so that they can participate in those rich, on-grade-level conversations. An alternative to TextTeaser is SMMRY (https:// smmry.com/), a tool that performs basically the same task. November 2019 • www.maineea.org
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