Early Childhood Special Education and Assistive Technology Blog

By: Sarah Pappo , Graduate Student Intern in Early Childhood Education (ECE) During this year I have interned in a half-day kindergarten program. It is difficult to get everything done in a 2 ½ hour day. There are days where we don’t even have enough time for writer or reader’s workshop. So how do we incorporate technology into the classroom?  Technology is a necessary component for students to learn and explore new things. Technology is integrated into our curriculum in many different ways. One of the ways is providing students with an opportunity to use the iPads or the Chromebooks during centers. In the classroom I have been incorporating technology more and more through my instruction.   For example when we are learning about upper case letters, the app Wet Dry Try (Handwriting Without Tears) allows students to practice these letters before they do them in their workbooks. I think that technology should be used, and it can be used to support students. Read...

By:  Lauren Pasquazzi, EC-SEAT Scholar There is a student in our classroom that has some delays in certain areas of development. One developmental domain that is a challenge for him is cognitive skills. When we do activities that involve numbers, this student has trouble remembering and will confuse the numbers. I have observed that this child is a sensory learner. He gravitates towards any of the sensory play centers and enjoys using his hands. I decided to try the iPad with this student. I downloaded some math apps and first showed the student how to use them. The iPad was a success! The student was engaged and getting the right answers when using the apps. Every week we have been using the iPad at a certain part of the day to help this child. We have seen a lot of progress. A couple apps we used: I chose Monkey Math by THUP Games . This is an app that helps to strengthen math skills by counting strategies and number recognition. Here is a video showing the app. Mon...

by Laura Kazmierczak , EC-SEAT Scholar Tiggly chef is a free app that combines fun cooking creations and early addition math concepts through cause and effect. The app allows for flexibility with numbers and reinforces the addition process with verbal narration as the items chef identifies are chosen by the student. The app can be used for all children learning early addition math concepts and would be especially beneficial to a child who loves to pretend to cook. The app also provides customization capabilities with the options to create your own recipes, ingredients, and addition problems. With its variations in recipe problems the app eliminates the possibility of simply memorizing problems to get them right and aims for learning through purposeful or meaningful ways. The app requires finger isolation and the ability to drag items into a bowl. You can also drag more than one item at a time to make varying math problems with the ingredients. Once the recipe's math probl...

By: Angela Dalessio , EC-SEAT scholar and dual major in Early Childhood Special Education and Special Education K-12 This is a chart that I was asked to develop during the required January Term online math class that I finished this past January.   We were asked to come up with criteria and then a way to rank the criteria for a website or an app.   We all know how it is important to have a reason or purpose for teaching something, but after using the criteria tool, I came to a new understanding about how important it is for me to take time out and actually rank these different apps to see what could and should be used in my classroom.   I think the ones that I chose would be fine to use, but maybe I could search more for apps or websites that would help my students with disabilities as well.   My criteria to evaluate tool may only be useful for me when evaluating websites and apps, because I think that everyone looks for different criteria that they find a...