Inclusive Learning 365

 The Pandemic and remote learning have accelerated the release of tech books about education issues. While assistive technology has always been at the forefront of edtech, it's importance seemed consumed by the need for all the students to access learning opportunities. Inclusive Learning 365: Edtech Strategies for Every Day of the Year, by Christopher Bugaj, Karen Janowski, Mike Marotta and Beth Poss addresses meeting the needs of students with disabilities through tech. They also stretch their ideas to show how they can be useful for all students. The book presents each idea as a separate page with an overview, inclusive uses, sample tools, extension ideas, related resources (links to videos and other resources around implementing the idea and standards for students. It is written in a highly readable format. Some ideas are repetitive, I'm not sure how often hashtags are mentioned. Some are old standbys, like audiobooks. Others are insights to extensions from Google or Microsoft that enable a particular feature. 

Reading this book through made clear to me how confusing this could be for students. Last year it became clear how confusing the multiple platforms we were exposing kids to could be. Yes, some of our darlings latched on to anything tech and ran with it.  Many of my students, however, struggled to learn and manage the platforms, needing far more support to utilize the new things that teachers came up with. It made me think of a presentation by a superintendent about the approach they took to working on developing vocabulary for our school, an area identified as a weakness across the board. They taught four strategies across the entire district and then expected the teachers to use those strategies and no others. Because they were taught across the board, once they were taught, students had the tools and teaching related to how to use them was reduced. Focusing on strategies meant that teachers really need to focus their vocabulary development and become aware of the number of words they expected students to learn for each class. While adaptive technology might be novel tools for individual students, coming up with a limited cadre of universal ones seems appropriate. 

I like the idea of being exposed to new skills on a slow rolling basis. Reading the book straight through had me dogearing a couple of pages to refer back to. Even a strategy a day, is probably more than most can incorporate into their schema. That said, having read through the book, I have an idea of where to go when I am trying to figure out how to do something more efficiently. An interesting resource, we'll see how practical some of the ideas are...