A Teacher's Obligation

While each teacher has a different title, be it a science teacher, math teacher or special ed teacher, all teachers are teachers. Our core job is to educate students to the best of our abilities. When a student cannot read, then teaching science by having students read book chapters is not going to educate the disadvantaged student. If our goal is to educate someone in science, then reading should not be a limiting factor. Instead, the science teacher must get creative.

If a student cannot read, then find a way to present material with limited visual words. Many people around the world are illiterate but function in life because life is not one dimensional, and reading it not the only way to convey a message. Videos, pictures, games, active participation in labs…all these things exemplify ways to convey science without words. If the student struggles with test time, then the student should be given accommodations for verbal or visual testing without words. Fortunately there are many assistive technologies to help students take verbal tests, without needing a human dictator, and the more technology grows, the more educating students can become creative.

Second, use other teachers! It simply amazes me that a science teacher struggling with a student who cannot read or perform math, does not seek out the math teacher and explain the troubles. It is possible that the other teacher has no clue how much the student is struggling. As a science teacher, I could easily provide a list of words which the student could practice with the reading teacher to help the student learn multi-dimensionally, with limited constraint on my personal time schedule.

Furthermore, there are tricks to every trade. In science, teaching a student to break down the scientific words into something easier or create a symbol in place of a word is common place. This may be the best method to limit words but still allow a student to be educated in science.

It is possible to educate around limiting factors, such a reading, and without much more effort. The effort must come from the creativity of the teacher and the conquering of the fear to try something new.

Reading in Science : A Struggle for Many

Even though a test may be designed with the intention of purely testing the students' knowlegde of the content, it is not so for those struggling with reading. Written tests, unfortunately, prevent such students from excelling in the subject, no matter how good they might actually be at solving math problems, applying physics principles, or even at performing experiments in bio or chemistry for that matter.
I believe that a science teacher's principal role should be to ensure that his/her students gain a solid understanding of scientific content.
According to me, the process of learning science is more hands-on and a minds-on, and things like language and the text book are just tools. As a science teacher, it would certainly not be my priority to train my students to scrutinize the text or identify subtleties in it. In fact, I would try to frame my test questions so that they are easy to read and understand, and would expect similar answers from my students. In addition, I would also have my students do experiments, projects and presentations (and grade them on each of these), thus providing a wider window of opportunity for doing well.
Assistive technologies can help students greatly in this respect. For instance, auditory learners find reading and absorbing large amounts of information simultaneously a challenging task. For such learners, the read aloud softwares can be extremely helpful. This software also comes equipped with features such as highlighting important text and an inbuilt dictionary which instantaneously looks up the meaning of the desired word in the text... which I think is pretty cool ! On a different note, difficulty in reading might also be due to poor vision. Magnifying software can blow up the text to 20 to 30 times the original size (without much distortion), which is ideal. Thus, assistive technologies play a major role in helping out students.

All students should benefit from assistive technologies!

In the past, I’ve experienced working with students of all grade level abilities at the secondary level. I've worked with students that are legally blind to students that are seniors reading on a third grade level. What works best for me and my classroom is figuring out the students and what works best for their specific situation. For example, when I taught high school it was often times embarrassing for students to have tests read to them individually. Usually, I would read the test directions and main sections a loud to the entire class. In the case with the legally blind student, he required print of 14pt font. That year everything I did for that class was in that font; making it easier for me and the student because he was not singled out with a different copy of work each day.

I’ve found that this can be most challenging in the middle school classroom. Often because students still need a lot of assistance in class (compared to high school students). I take the same approach with reading directions and main questions out loud, but then I use my planning time to find the student who was unable to finish the test and I finish reading the test to them one-on-one. In some unique cases, I’ve had to pull students aside outside of class and verbally ask questions to them the entire test to “test” their knowledge. I personally feel that it’s more important to test their knowledge then to worry about the means in which they are being tested. Although this is time consuming for me, I feel that it’s best for the student. I struggle with those teachers that fail students because they didn’t finish a test. I’ve never understood the rationale in penalizing a student because they are a slower reader, or want to check answers, etc.

Another aspect of my classroom is organizing the structure of delivery and learning approaches such that all students will be successful. I try to use labs, assistive technology, problem-based learning, inquiry, and other methods of instruction to help students learn, as well as test their skills and knowledge in a subject area. I feel that all students should benefit from assistive technology regardless of their disability or lack of disability.

As a teacher, I believe in giving students every opportunity to succeed. Sometimes this means scarifying my planning time or lunch, but my students know that I care about their success and I think they worker harder in class because of it! I’ve always found it a huge complement when other teachers come to me about a student seeking advice on how to get “Johnny” to do his work because they struggle with the student for a variety of reasons. From my experience, it’s all in your approach with how you handle the students both individually and as a class. When students know that you care about them and their success they will try their best and work hard for you regardless of their disabilities or daily struggles.

Students struggling in Reading

Tests can be a poor assessment of a student's knowledge of a science, you are testing their ability to read the material in addition to their comprehension of it. Even a practical exam will have written instructions, and a students grade may not accurately reflect their understanding of the material. However an individual's competency will assessed through reading for the rest of their student and professional careers. There are technologies that can be implemented to minimize the effects of difficulty reading on the assessment e.g larger text or different formatting may help students with visual impairments, having someone read the questions to the student or using a text-to-speech program.
In addition to assistive technologies, it is important that teachers work on reading skills in all subjects. All our students may benefit from skills taught to struggling readers. Student who are reading at a high level in other subjects may need to be taught how to read the textbook and there will be plenty of unfamiliar vocabulary in our lessons. It would be a shame if difficulty and frustration over reading the class material and tests resulted in a student's dislike for the subject.

Web page designing

I thoroughly enjoyed designing the class webpage, and think that weebly is extremely user friendly and simple. The choice of backgrounds is quite amazing, and uploading files and embedding links is very simple, which is good. However, there are some faults too, such as not being able to shift the text box to the desired position, and just limiting your videos to two clips. I'm not sure, but these problems might be specific to the design or background chosen. I wonder if y'all too encountered the same problems?
On the whole, it's simple, fast and yes... quite addicting too :)

Web Page Fun

Wow I love weebly! I think this is a great tool to allow students access to materials, either extra materials or to give them the option to look at lecture content again. I also like the idea of a communication tool that is open to parents and students. I am a little frustrated with formatting issues, but I definitely can't complain when it's free! I don't think any classes in my high school had their own websites, but I really like the idea!

Graphic Organizers

After making my graphic organizer in Word (which took forever because of all the formatting problems by the way), I was thinking about this whole concept of graphic organizers. I remember hating worksheets in high school. I think, as a student, I would have preferred to have a handout without blanks so that I could use the visual aid when studying or making my own graphic organizer. Following the thoughts and format of another person never really helped me. I had to create my own connections throughout the content. I was just wondering what you all thought of the "worksheet" version versus a "handout" version or having the students synthesize their own. Depending on the academic level of the students, this might be done as group work in the classroom.

New to Graphic Organizers

This week I made my first graphic organizer and I wanted to share both the joys and trials of the experience. I really enjoyed designing, creating and formatting the whole thing. I used power point for the design, partially because it has good features and partially because its a program I know well. My difficulty was that power point made it difficult to manuver whole pieces instead of just individual pieces. I also found it hard to reduce my explanations to one page. There is just so much to say about the awesome subject of science!! Anyway, I hope that you all have enjoyable experiences with making graphic organizers...they really are a neat teaching tool.

Lost Data

I have only had a few encounters with lost data. After my first accident with losing information I became an "obsessive saver." Every few minutes I have to hit the save button just incase. My first experience with lost data happened my senior year of college. I was working on a 10 pager paper that was due the following evening. I had only finished about half of it when I sat down at home to do the rest. I lived in an extremely old house and our power would often trip which would send all of our electronics into a frenzy. My roommate had actually been working on the same assignment with me when all of a sudden..someone in the house turned on a blow dryer and boom. Power tripped. At the time I was in the last few stages of life with my Dell computer, it couldn't keep charge unless the computer was connected to the wall. So, unfortunately I had lost about 3 pages of information. Soon after I got a MAC and haven't had any trouble since!

Helping My Mother

A couple of years ago my Mom upgraded her virus protection to a great program. One that I would definitely recommend. But, she bought it for just a year subscription. When I visited home about a year and a half later the computer had so many issues on it. It was slow, it was full of spy ware, and my mom was having trouble with Word, where she was trying to write her book!
I recognized that she had not resubscribed the program. Fortunately, there were no major viruses, but it was enough to make working on the computer a hassle as opposed to a convenience. Moral of the story, make sure your virus and spy ware protection are up to date.

Virus in the CD-rom drive

My very first encounter with a virus was the most memorable one. This happened about 15 years ago, and I remember that we had recently upgraded our computer from a 368 to a Pentium (which was a big family decision, and a source of great excitement !).
About a month after the new computer arrived, I received an email with a music file as an attachment, which I downloaded... and later wished I hadn't. Seconds after the file downloaded, the CD-rom self ejected itself, and on pushing it back in, would pop out again. This happened a number of times. Restarting the computer was futile, because the moment Windows would load, the CD-rom would start its tricks again (as if it was possessed :) )
Eventually, we did manage to get it fixed, but had to replace both, the CD-rom and floppy drive (no, floppies weren't obsolete yet..) , as both had apparently been affected. It was quite a bizarre experience !