Friday, August 31, 2012

What's Your Homework?!?!

Homework
Many of our youngsters with learning disabilities struggle to get their homework for the day copied off the board. This is a regular sore point for parents! Kids come home and they either wrote nothing, copied incompletely, or what they did write is illegible.

One solution we've used when we've exhausted other modalities is to have the student take a snapshot with an iTouch.

I like to make a box for the teacher to write in, using electrical tape on their white-board. This serves two functions: 1. the teachers have an area dedicated for homework (this can help our scribing students as well), and 2. it serves as a visual cue for taking the photograph.

Once the picture is taken, the student can email it using the built-in software to do so. We ask the student to mail it to an email they share with a parent. The other option we've used on occasion is to load the picture up in Dropbox or iCloud. Using Dropbox or iCloud, we want to be certain the accounts are shared with the parents, and that they are emptying the photos at the end of each week.

Whether the student emails the photo or moves it to a "cloud" server, the picture will have a date and time associated with it automatically, which further helps reduce confusion.

I'd love to hear if you are using the iTouch camera in interesting ways.

Happy therapy!

2 comments:

  1. Jim, What kind of successes if any have you found with adding homework, snapshots of homework, etc. to classroom websites?

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    1. SK, I have to say, that is a great idea! And in doing so, admit that I've not thought of that before. I have found however, that classroom websites can be tremendous tools, or epically disappointing "this site under construction" cyber waste-lands. Taking your idea a step further, if a teacher shot a pic of the homework, and even class notes on her iTouch, she could upload the image into an app such as Blogger, and "Publish" the image straight to a blog, much like this one. Oooo, I'm gonna' find me a few guinea-pigs tomorrow! I'll report back after I find a few willing teachers.

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