RESOURCES
What's on this Page
Special Education (DIGITAL) Portfolio for High School
https://sites.google.com/site/specialeducationportfoliohs/
This is a template for a digital portfolio I created on "Google Sites" that houses all of the things (almost) that I compile for each student I work with. It is a way to take all of the different things that pertain to the student and put them in one place. This means that I don't have the "accommodations" form in their file in my file cabinet, their IEP on my hardrive (and an older draft in the schools network drive), and notes about behaviour in my Excel Spreadsheet, and teacher feedback forms in a Google Form in my Google Drive. Instead of that, all of these things are compiled here so you can have a full picture of the student in one place and keep things easy.
In addition to the organization and ease of use, this is also an excellent way for "hand-offs". This means that when a 9th grade teacher is getting new 8th graders, the 8th grade teacher will have everything in one place and the 9th grade teacher can copy that website and make it their own. Or if someone is taking over your permission you can share ownership of the site (a.k.a. student portfolio) to the new teacher and within a few seconds they will have every pertinent document that they will need. I have added a part to the "Notes" section of each grade level page to have "Notes for Next Year" to help the incoming teacher know everything that was being done with the student, and it will also help you in August remember all the different things you had set up for each student.
This also helps with students who are exiting your program and need access to old IEPs, work samples, transition work, etc. You can give them a copy of the link, or share one page with them and they will have what they need and will not have to deal with too much hullabaloo to get it.
Lastly, I like the use of this portfolio because it helps with keeping up to date info, it is safe and secure with different levels of permissions that you can grant, everything is in one place, and it can help Spedukators with best practices. What I mean by this is that for example you may see that year after year you have little to no information in the "Transition" section, or "Work Samples". That can lead you to think about your practices and spur you (me) to do more of these activities.
https://sites.google.com/site/specialeducationportfoliohs/
Middle School Special Education (DIGITAL) Portfolio
This is the same style as the high school portfolio, except that the pages are for middle school and some tweaks have been made to the pages to make them more pertinent to middle school.
https://sites.google.com/site/specialedportfoliomiddleschool/
Elementary School Special Education (DIGITAL) Portfolio
This is the same style as the high school and middle school portfolio, except that the pages are for elementary and some tweaks have been made to the pages to make them more pertinent to elementary school.
https://sites.google.com/site/specialeducationelemportfolio/
Books:
Over the years I have found myself utilizing a lot of resources like other teachers, online resources, etc, however, these are books that I continually come back to and either can't live without or wonder how I let it leave my possession. In looking them over they are very helpful for the Special Educator (Resource teacher), but I think the vocab and even the Behaviour Intervention Manual, amongst others, could be very helpful to any teacher:
1) BIM (Behaviour Intervention Manual)
This is a book that I have utilized a lot! If you are having a problem with a given behaviour (any type of behaviour, i.e. not turning in homework to head banging), you can look up the behaviour in the book, find a goal or goals for the behaviour and then you can find sometimes 2 or 3 pages of objectives on how to meet the goal. It is very helpful for IEP writing and for setting up behaviour plans.
2) PRIM (Pre-Referal Intervention Manual)
This book is similar to the BIM
3) "Co-Teaching in the Differentiated Classroom" by Fattig and Taylor (2008)
This is a book I read one summer after spending a year co-teaching, after spending several years not co-teaching. Ya dig? It helped me a lot and gave me some good ideas about how to go about co-teaching. How to set it up, how to collaborate and a lot of information on the different styles, and forms you can use to get conversations going, among other things.
4. "Building Academic Vocabulary: Teachers Manual" by Marzano & Pickering
Marzano probably goes without saying much about him and his ideas that we have been exposed to over the years. I got this book in my first or second year of teaching and still have it in my shelf. It goes through the stages of teaching vocab, gives a lot of ideas of how to do it, etc. Good resource.
5. "Learning to Learn" by Gloria Frender
This is a book that has been helpful for me as a Resource teacher having a dedicated resource class. It has a lot of great graphic organizers and ideas and lesson plans relating to such subjects as: learning styles, organizational skills, test-taking skills, note-taking skills, etc. I was able to use this to help guide some of the things I taught the students over the years. Some of their "articles" or sections would get directly built into a Powerpoint lesson. Check out my CURRICULUM page for some of those lessons.
6. "Tools for Thoughs" by Jim Burke
This is a book of GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS. It has graphic organizers for anything you can think of. I believe there are more than 50. What he does is provide a one or two page writeup about the organizer, then he provides an example of one filled in, and finally at the back of the book he has them all in full page, ready to print, pages.
Over the years I have used some more than others, and some lend themselves better to certain subject areas. Some of my favorites have been, Q Notes, Episodic Notes, Conversational Roundtable, Think in Threes, and Reporters Notes.
7. "Informal Assessments for Transition Planning" by Clark, Patton, Moulton
This is a book that I have used as I have done "Transition Planning" with my high school students. It has been invaluable in helping shape my own approach to the Individual Transition Plan with the multitudes of surveys and what not. It helps you to really delve into the child's life in order to help take them to the next stage of their development.
8. "Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity" by Andrew Solomon
Tutorials:
These are various tutorials that I have either made for students or other teachers, or have found to be helpful to different cats that I have worked with.
1) Diigo.com
Diigo is an awesome tool that can be used to annotate web pages and have the annotations go to the Diigo server and stay organized for you. That means that you can add this plug-in to your browser, hilite text on a webpage, write a note about it, and then it is saved in Diigo, and it will also be saved on the webpage that you annotated. (expound)
Here is a link to the tutorial that gives an overview of Diigo and shows you how to set it up:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn07wU40HkQ
2) Evernote
(Expound)
Here is a link to the tutorial that gives an overview of Diigo and shows you how to set it up:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFBCmBmH7io
3) Macros ( to fill out online IEP forms)
Expound....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z77W_IyRJEQ
4) Quizlet.com
....I think you may want to make a new one....or just put this as a link
5) Student Accounts for Mac OS
This video is to show you how to have a separate account for students on your Mac so you can share your Mac with them ( instead of sending them to the library or something of the sort ) without having to worry about them looking through your social media, deleting documents, closing windows, etc.
Here is a link to the tutorial that gives an overview of this process and how to set it up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV0XtmKDlEc
Links:
1) " Humans Not Robots ". . . This is a website similar to mine by a Special Educator in the UK who is doing big things. It took me forever to find a website like this, and when I found it I was very excited. He has a blog and links to lots of his materials that he has created over the years to help students with special needs.
2) " Carol's Web Corner " I found this website while looking for strategies for working with student's with ADHD and found this to be a great site.
....parents/ professional stuff
...have a blurb for eacho one...maybe a pic
CARS for IEP goals
Add a link to your App on the Apple store
???? Are case manager resources going to go here? (I think that it may be better to have this in the "Random" page and then I can have subpages from the tabele)
......DP you need to change the URLs of your sites. I think. For example, the behaviour one is titled as HW in the search box