Teacher Resources
A guide on assistive technology from Easterseals Outreach Program and Technology Services
"With the advancement and infiltration of technology into all education, the gap has significantly narrowed between technology used by students with disabilities from that of their nondisabled peers. With an increased focus on personalized learning in education, assistive technology can be applied to a Universal Design for Learning Framework that benefits all students."
"The Assistive Technology & Accessible Educational Materials Center is a centralized, responsive resource center that empowers individuals with disabilities by providing accessible educational materials, access to assistive technologies and highly specialized technical assistance and professional development support."
CAST Professional Learning provides practitioners with instructional design and teaching strategies to make curriculum more effective through Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a framework that recognizes learner variability and is a blueprint for creating instructional goals, methods, materials, and assessments that work for everyone–not a single, one-size-fits-all solution but rather flexible approaches to teaching and learning. Educators can benefit from a variety of online courses, onsite institutes, and other opportunities to expand and enrich their practice.
This google site, developed by Easter Seals Outreach and the Children and Youth with Dual Sensory Impairments (CAYSI) Project, offers numerous teacher resources on IEP goal development, instructional strategies, assessments, and more.
The IRIS Center is a national center dedicated to improving education outcomes for all children, especially those with disabilities birth through age twenty-one. The IRIS Center offers a wide variety of resources and services to suit a diverse set of instructional needs and circumstances, including interactive modules, case studies, and activities on evidence-based instructional and intervention practices.
This educator page offers a host of resources for including instructional strategies for teaching students with Learning Disabilities (LD) or Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD).
The Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) has added UDL modifications to many of their LDC mini-tasks. From the LDC blog: "As our library of exemplary mini-tasks has grown to more than 400 contributions authored by teachers across the LDC community of practice, we continue to strive to feature examples that support not only the skills and standards you need to address across all disciplines and grade levels, but also examples that meet the diverse needs of all the students you teach. To that end, in this blog we will illustrate how Universal Design for Learning (UDL) supports can be embedded within existing LDC mini-tasks to support students who have a wide range of needs. We will reference examples from a new collection of exemplary LDC mini-tasks that feature such UDL supports. We hope to grow this collection in the future based on your contributions and suggestions.”
This teacher page provides a number of articles focused on techniques and strategies to help support students of all abilities—including those with learning disabilities.
The Ride Reading Intervention Bank is a multimedia Web-based program consisting of 100 research-based instructional or intervention tactics across the five critical areas of literacy: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and omprehension. The RIDE Reading Intervention Bank gives teachers the option to not only peruse a variety of literacy tactics (including links to all necessary worksheets needed to successfully teach each skill), but also to view videos of selected tactics that demonstrate critical parts of the tactic or that provide supplemental information. In addition, there is a student tracking and graphing system that allows teachers to easily monitor student progress and responses to the interventions tried over time.
This free online app helps with reading comprehension and vocabulary development by simplifying English to a lower reading level. The app works as a dictionary alternative that allows users to reduce text complexity by rewording a sentence or an entire paragraph.
Special education course codes for resource classes, self-contained classes, and classes for students on the Alternate Pathway to Graduation
This program has gathered high-quality articles on educational approaches to teaching students on the autism spectrum. Articles cover a variety of topics from structured teaching to inclusion to preparing for college.
This page offers a compilation of resources designed to help teachers and counselors prepare students to transition from school to adult life and reach positive post-school outcomes.
