District 6 Instructional Framework

Education - Standards and Learning Targets

Lessons consider students' needs, interests and passions.

Providing a learner with a tool is often not enough. We need to provide the support to use the tool effectively. Many learners need help navigating through their environment (both in terms of physical space and the curriculum), and all learners should be given the opportunity to use tools that might help them meet the goal of full participation in the classroom. However, significant numbers of learners with disabilities have to use Assistive Technologies for navigation, interaction, and composition on a regular basis. It is critical that instructional technologies and curricula do not impose inadvertent barriers to the use of these assistive technologies. An important design consideration, for example, is to ensure that there are keyboard commands for any mouse action so that learners can use common assistive technologies that depend upon those commands. It is also important, however, to ensure that making a lesson physically accessible does not inadvertently remove its challenge to learning.

Provide alternate keyboard commands for mouse action
Build switch and scanning options for increased independent access and keyboard alternatives
Provide access to alternative keyboards
Customize overlays for touch screens and keyboards
Select software that works seamlessly with keyboard alternatives and alt keys

There is a tendency in schooling to focus on traditional tools rather than contemporary ones. This tendency has several liabilities: 1) it does not prepare learners for their future; 2) it limits the range of content and teaching methods that can be implemented; 3) it restricts learners ability to express knowledge about content (assessment); and, most importantly, 4) it constricts the kinds of learners who can be successful. Current media tools provide a more flexible and accessible toolkit with which learners can more successfully take part in their learning and articulate what they know. Unless a lesson is focused on learning to use a specific tool (e.g., learning to draw with a compass), curricula should allow many alternatives. Like any craftsman, learners should learn to use tools that are an optimal match between their abilities and the demands of the task.

Provide spellcheckers, grammar checkers, word prediction software
Provide text-to-speech software (voice recognition), human dictation, recording
Provide calculators, graphing calculators, geometric sketchpads, or pre-formatted graph paper
Provide sentence starters or sentence strips
Use story webs, outlining tools, or concept mapping tool
Provide Computer-Aided-Design (CAD), music notation (writing) software, or mathematical notation software
Provide virtual or concrete mathematics manipulatives (e.g., base-10 blocks, algebra blocks)
Use web applications (e.g., wikis, animation, presentation)

Learners vary not only in their skills and abilities, but also in the kinds of challenges that motivate them to do their best work. All learners need to be challenged, but not always in the same way. In addition to providing appropriately varied levels and types of demands, learners also need to be provided with the right kinds of resources necessary for successful completion of the task. Learners cannot meet a demand without appropriate, and flexible, resources. Providing a range of demands, and a range of possible resources, allows all learners to find challenges that are optimally motivating. Balancing the resources available to meet the challenge is vital.

Differentiate the degree of difficulty or complexity within which core activities can be completed
Provide alternatives in the permissible tools and scaffolds
Vary the degrees of freedom for acceptable performance
Emphasize process, effort, improvement in meeting standards as alternatives to external evaluation and competition

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