Supporting students with disabilities is multi-layered and includes providing required special education services, including Specially Designed Instruction, Supplementary Aids and Services, and accommodations. We've gathered some of our favorite visuals, articles, and resource links here to support you in your work, no matter what your role is in the school structure.
This site has many resources you can use to support students with disabilities and those in the referral process.
Behavior interventions and supports for families during COVID-19 and remote learning.
If you are looking for strategies to support students who have experienced concussions and other acquired brain injuries, click here for a short video and here for a PDF of suggestions to use during online learning.
The Council for Exceptional Children's technology division (ISET) has recommended the following tech to support closed captioning.
Webcaptioner - The benefits of Webcaptioner include its quick set up and myriad of settings straight from a web browser tab. It is especially useful for students who are dual sensory impaired as the background and font color/size can be changed to display text that is accessible by users with varying vision levels. It will allow a transcript to be saved for registered users. There is no fee associated with this tool. One of the drawbacks is that it does not produce text with punctuation and capitalization is limited to known proper nouns. Educators would have to either split the screen being shared or have it displayed on their board. Students can also open the app on their device, but the distance from the input microphone impacts the accuracy of the text.
Microsoft Translator - Microsoft has developed a translator that will caption from both a web browser or an iOS or Android device through their app. A teacher can display the captions on their screen or they can create a room for students to join on their own devices and watch the captions. Another useful feature of Microsoft Translator is that it will translate between spoken languages. For example, if a teacher is speaking English and a parent speaks French, both parties can set their input and output languages and it will translate between the two languages. For captions, all parties set their app/browser to the same language.
For more in-depth knowledge about captions including helpful handouts and our Captioning Guide, visit our Captioned Media webpage. Feel free to reach out directly if you should have any questions.