Establishing an Accessible Social Presence

Portfolio Assignment from Module 5.

Activity 5.2: Establishing an Accessible Social Presence

Reflection for Activity 5.2: Establishing an Accessible Social Presence:

Having had students in my class that have an IEP, I've become familiar with the IDEA act, IEPs, and 504 plans, but I had never heard of section 508 that all website content must be equally accessible to those with disabilities. This was definitely an eye opener. I think I've done a very good job as far as making my math classes accessible to my special education students, students with IEPs and 504s, and my English Language Learners.

I have established routines in my class and always have a clear objectives posted that I refer to constantly. I use a lot of visuals, drawings, and contextualization in my lessons, and because I teach with my iPad, I am always facing my students and never have my back to them.

However, these readings opened my eyes to the lack of accessibility of the online content I have been creating. I have not been using Headers and styles to create the hierarchy in my documents, such as my Syllabus, or assignment sheets. I also have not been captioning my videos that have been posted online. With this new information, I'll start using www.youtubecc.com to caption my youtube lessons/playlists, and I planned on recreating my syllabi this year anyways, so now iIll start to incorporate use of the Headers and Styles within those documents and my google site. I will also need to start inserting a caption on images that I insert into online documents.

If students are using my computers, I can have them use 'Announcify' a free text to speech app that is a google chrome extension.