My Action Plan By Stephanie Riedstra Assistive Technology July 2011

“I’m gonna use this!” “HOW?” “In every opportunity possible.”

Personal and Professional Growth This year it is my goal to seek out a workshop or professional development activity that will further some aspect of my knowledge, understanding, and skills with Assistive Technology. I am going to take an energized interest in the students I see frequently who use Assistive Technology. I am going to ask those students to show me how they use their AT.

When I’m back in the Classroom.... Our job as Special Education Teachers is to bring these resources and material to the students. It is our job to make it accessible. I am going to start asking myself these question when I am lesson planning: Does this work for everyone? Are there other ways I could teach this? And most of all after this course, I will ask myself, Are my expectations of students accessible to everyone? Can everyone accomplish this. What are all the ways in which I can let my students communicate their knowledge?

Accessible and Engaging I’m going to make it a goal to create lessons using the principles of universal design. I am going to evaluate my lessons on the principles of UDL, for ALL of my students, not just the ones in Special Education. I can think of many students of whom I can do a better job of engaging.

SHARE staff parentscolleagues As a TOC, I’ve been thinking about ways in which I can share the things I’ve learned in this class right away as well as the future. Right now I am planning on using many of the multimedia tools we learned. I could teach them to students when I am TOCing and then the students would be able to introduce the Classroom Teacher to new multimedia tools and perhaps use them and expand on them!

And then I’m going to share some more... This perhaps is one of the things I’m most excited about for now because it is something I can do for a specific person. This is a picture of my Dad reading to me and my brother when I was 2. One day I want my Dad to be able to read to my kids. My Dad has a degenerative disease called Retinitus Pigmentosa and he has been slowly going blind for a long time. My Dad is probably not going to learn to read Braille... But he could learn to use things like Accessible Books and other tools! I’m excited to show him many of the free and very accessible assistive technologies out there so that he’ll always be able to read my favourite books to my kids

My favourite tools... Because.... Clicker5 Boardmaker Wiki Wordle ToonDoo Kurzweil myStudyBar My Wiki is especially useful to me! I am always ing myself lesson plans or links to websites or videos to use in my plans. It will be so handy to have an online place to store and repeatedly access these resources!

“When I realized I was NOT technologically defunct.” Photo from AssistiveTech4All.pbworks.com

Thank You!