Teachers Using Technology to Open up the World to Special Education Students

Teachers Using Technology to Open up the World to Special Education Students

https://thejournal.com/Articles/2016/05/11/5-Ways-Teachers-Are-Opening-Up-the-World-to-Special-Education-Through-Technology.aspx?Page=1

This article discussed an online global collaboration between students with special needs from all over the world called the SMARTee Project.  The students use SMART Amp technology to collaborate online and teach each other about their local cultural traditions and events.  Six special education teachers first met at SMART Technologies' Exemplary Educators conference last summer. They discovered that they had more in common with each other than with the general education teachers who were at the conference.  Brianna Owens, a special education teacher from New Mexico, said, "'...Special ed really does look very similar on the global scale, be it South Africa or Germany or Finland, and so we talked about how we could meet some of the challenges by having our kids work together.'"  She states that the goal of the SMARTee project is to help students understand their differences, but also that their similarities make them more alike than different.

Other teachers from around the world are also using global collaboration projects.  Kids with a variety of disabilities are using technology to connect with kids from all over the world and feel more engaged in learning as a result of this inclusive environment.  Below is a description of one of the projects that teachers and kids have created.

Michael Soskil, a science teacher in Newfoundland, PA, had an inclusive class with both special and general education students that were a part of a musical exchange project with a group of children in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya.  There, about 250,000 people live in extreme poverty in about 1.5 square miles.  The students in Mr. Soskil's class started a video exchange project in which the Kenyan students recorded videos to teach the American students some Swahili, while the American students made videos to teach the Kenyan students some math concepts.  Soskil's lower-level math ability students taught simpler math concepts to the younger Kenyan students.  Soskil says, "'We know that when kids teach they retain 90 percent of what they learned, rather than when they consume, they only retain 20 percent.'"Soskil states that for these students to create a video in which they teach was "'pretty powerful'".

Soskils' students were concerned about the living conditions of their friends in Kenya.  They heard about the water crisis that all of Kenya was enduring, and they created a campaign with students in Kansas and Greece to help get clean drinking water for the Kenyan students.  Soskil states that in order for students to transfer material from short term to long term memory, they have to have an emotional connection with the information they are learning.  This is especially true for students with different learning disabilities.  Soskil states "'And what global collaboration does, especially when it's on a meaningful topic, where kids are doing good in the world, is it really creates those emotional connections that allows kids to hold onto information.'"

There are several benefits of such global collaboration for special education students.  The article highlights that they teach about their own culture and learn about other cultures, work together across cultures, learn by helping others, develop leadership skills and a sense of responsibility, and for nonverbal students, there is the reduction of communication barriers. Students with disabilities are gaining confidence and a desire to learn, The discovery that they can help others and work together to have a positive impact on the world is huge for them. It seems to me that such gains open up possibilities for them in the future as these students see that they can do more things that perhaps before they assumed they couldn't.  The article talks about the barriers and difficulties some students with disabilities face as they collaborate with the student sitting next to them and how it is easier for them to work collaboratively with a student from another country.  I hope that as the students with disabilities continue to gain confidence and skills as they participate in global collaboration projects, such confidence will help them in their interactions with students in their own classroom as well.