I'm going to start uploading some documents to the new Educational Resources page on this site. I need to pare down the size of a couple of the files and I might not get that done until this weekend. But I want to share this stuff with the general public. And here is my rationale.
I do research on math interventions for learners with disabilities, particularly those with more severe disabilities. In doing this research, I want to use resources that I believe classroom personnel could also create and use on their own. I've chosen technology as my medium for delivery. I've used handheld devices to provide video prompting and video modeling for the past few projects and had some success. Since so many classrooms have either handheld devices or computers of some sort, utilizing this technology has been important to me.
When I design a project, I look to task analyses to break down the skills for the learner. In doing this, I can create short videos of the steps to use for video prompting. By using handheld devices, which more times than not have a camera on them, I am demonstrating that classroom personnel could also create these types of videos based on the task analysis. Once the video is created, I drop it into a PowerPoint presentation template that I created. This template has embedded forward and back buttons and replay options. This allows the student to move through the task analysis until it is complete.
I've chosen this approach with a single purpose in mind. Teachers teach the skills. However, with special ed students, additional prompting and repeated trials are often required to learn the skill. This can be time consuming for the classroom personnel. By automating this into a PowerPoint presentation that can be delivered on a tablet or computer, the classroom personnel is more able to provide higher level, individual prompting to those students struggling while, at the same time, allowing the technology to provide prompts to those who might not need as high level of prompting.
So, I will be sharing at least the template on my new Resources page. A complete PowerPoint with embedded videos seems to be too large to upload on this site, so I need to change a few things. But I'd like to get your feedback on what you think of the idea of using this technology the way I am proposing. The teachers I've worked with seem to like the idea, but that is a limited sample size. :-)
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