WHAT KINDS OF TOOLS WILL SIPPORT LEARNING DIFFERENCES?

Rich media and web apps for people with learning disabilities

Antonia Hyde has created a great presentation and posted it to slideshare. She has solid advice for web developers interested in making sites accessible. 

Have you noticed the buzz in some blogs lately about using twitter? It's  another important area in which the web is useful and where social media is useful. By assembling a diverse group of people to follow, in a sense reading over their shoulder, there's a great mechanism for discovering new creative ideas. The heart of web 2.0 tools is in the layers of ideas that turn into larger projects or groups of people working on projects. There seems to be a lot of opportunity to create new support across all interests. 

These structures will reportedly thrive on the diversity of the people that contribute to them. Preparing our students for a future of effective collaboration with others and to problem solve relies a lot on our ability to teach them to overcome and/or manage their neurological differences.

There are several categories of web 2.0 tools including those for collaboration, communication, presentation, organization, problem solving and creativity & design. Bubbl.us is a tool for organization that allowed me to organize the example above on William Shakespeare. Particularly useful for those who have disorganized thinking, processing disorders, ADHD, and meta-cognitive differences. Bubbl.us is a relatively simple tool and can be downloaded for free.

The above concept map, downloaded from the internet, is more complex. For students in the higher grades and for those with large amounts of information that follows a pattern of evolution, concept maps can be a true saving grace.

Not only do they provide a graphic representation of a person’s structural knowledge or conceptual understanding of a particular topic, they can be used as a tool to visualize and measure the depth, breadth, and organization of a student's knowledge. The appearance of a concept map often looks like a spider web consisting of nodes that are connected by links to create diagrams that demonstrate conceptualizations of relationships among key ideas in a specific topic area. 

Google Docs is an easy to use web 2.0 collaboration tool. Though I confess to formerly disliking "group work" and collaboration, I have come to embrace it as a favorite tool for broadening my perspective on learning. Google Docs allows multiple people to write and share information on one document. Aside from the importance collaboration has in modern life, by observing others work students will gain exposure to new approaches.

Livebinders is an amazing web 2.0 tool for organization, something many of us would like to do better. Particularly for students in high school or older, if one were to be disciplined and incorporate use of this tool into a research project, the outcome could be very impressive.

Online Learning Portfolios can be made for almost any grade level study. If given their own login, each child could organize and manage ongoing and finished projects on one page.

Above is a Personal Learning Network that I created for myself. For students with learning disabilities, a visual map like this would provide a means for referencing sources that are meaningful to them. It is even a meaningful exercise to create a PLN and reflect on the elements you rely on for information.

It is worth mentioning that each of the examples mentioned are flexible and interactive- not flat and one dimensional. It is this element that engages people with them.