1 May 2009
20 April 2009
Odds and Ends
Just a couple of short notes today (in the style of The Jose Vilson); none of which merit their own blog post:
Feed Me
If you don’t have enough feeds in your RSS reader (and really, who ever has enough?), you can check my Google Reader shared items feed. This is the same feed or stories that you see in the sidebar at DamianBariexca.net, but you can subscribe to this in your reader of choice. I try to limit my feed’s focus to psychology, special education, or technology that I think has potential for use in the special ed classroom (and Ira Socol’s SpeEd Change features regularly in my shared items).
Tech Geekery
I spent much of this past weekend playing with my new toy, the Asus EeePC 1000HE. A few cons, mostly pros, and I will likely be putting up a “Tools of the Trade” post on this machine before the end of the school year. Bottom line: best $400 I’ve spent recently.
Stop By & Say Hi
If you happen to be in the Jamesburg, NJ area on Friday, May 1, why not attend the NJASP Spring Conference? Jim Wright, founder of Intervention Central, will be presenting on “Strategies for Working with the Unmotivated, Non-Compliant, Disorganized, Struggling Student” (link to PDF). I’ll be there, and am considering liveblogging, if I can. If you’re interested, see the linked PDF above for registration information.
Call for Advice
So every member of my new Child Study Team has some ‘pet project’ that they contribute to the department, and along those lines, I’ve been approached to put together a website for the department (not sure if it’s just for CST or Special Services in general; will get more details in the summer).
My supervisor and I both have some ideas as to what should go on the site, but here’s where I reach out to you: I want to make this site more than just pictures and contact info; at the very least, I want to make it an information repository for students and parents. What information do you think would be most valuable on a high school CST/Special Services site? Transition information? Laws in “plain English”? Flowcharts of legal processes? Biographical information about the team/teachers? A blogroll? Monthly blog posts/articles?
Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments here – parents, what info can we make readily available to you? Special ed teachers/service providers, what “frequently asked questions” or topics would you put on a site for the community?
26 February 2009
Tools of the Trade: Evernote
Evernote is one of those tools I really wanted to like and use when I first heard of it, but after playing with it for a while, I decided I really had no need for it. I was teaching then, and I had all the files I needed organized neatly in folders and synced between my tablet and my home desktop. Cool concept, right tool, wrong time.
Fast forward to September 2008: I’m now a school psychologist, responsible for a case management load of over 70 students. I started using one of my first “Web 2.0″ loves, Tiddlywiki, to help keep my notes on each student organized. As much as I liked it for maintaining plain text notes, that’s really all it could do without further tinkering. Linking to local files was too time-consuming, and God forbid I move a file – broken & useless link.
When I switched schools in January, I also switched note-keeping tools. Looking for something a little more robust than Tiddlywiki, I dusted off my Evernote install, updated to the latest version, and began to play. My trial period turned into a love affair.
How We Roll
Within a given account, Evernote allows you to create “notebooks”, and within each notebook, you have “notes” – think of them as a neverending stack of index cards. Like Tiddlywiki, these notes can accommodate plain text, hyperlinks, bullets, number lists, etc., but Evernote also allows you to drag and drop files into your “index cards”. Users with free accounts are restricted to dragging and dropping images, audio, ink, and PDF files, but if you are a paying user ($5/mo or $45/yr), you can drag any kind of file AND have Evernote synchronize so that your files are accessible from any computer with Evernote installed, the Evernote website, or your mobile phone (via either a mobile site, Windows Mobile app, or iPhone app).
In my quest to go as paperless as possible at work, I scan a lot of documents to PDF. When I drag them into Evernote, I can view the document directly in Evernote via their baked-in PDF viewer (courtesy the good folks at Foxit, maker of my PDF viewer of choice).
Relevance to School Psychology
Ours is a profession that depends greatly on paper trails and written documentation. Evernote is a convenient, paper-free method of storing information in just about any medium you may use. From an organizational standpoint, here’s an example of how I’ve set up some notebooks on general topics:
This screenshot is from my home computer. The notebooks with greyed-out icons are local-only; the green icons indicated synchronized folders (I access these from my computer at work, too). As you can see, I’ve set up separate notebooks for business cards, documentation regarding my certification status in both NJ and PA, information on doctoral programs, our local Polytech program, and even a repository of research articles I have encountered over the years.
Beneath these notebooks are individual notebooks for each student on my caseload. Any time I need to record pertinent information for or about a student, it goes directly into Evernote. I have a clipboard & pen that saves my written notes as PDFs, so even when I am without my computer (e.g., a classroom observation), I can still write down what I need to, save it to PDF, and drop it from the clipboard’s SD card right into Evernote.
I have even been able to digitally record important information, compress the wav file, and archive it here. Who needs a stack of cassette tapes lying around when you can keep it all here?
Even if you don’t wish to set up several notebooks, you can use Evernote as a “brain dump” and use their search function to find what you need when you need it. Their OCR technology even allows you to search the text in PDFs and photographs.
Of course, privacy and confidentiality are also important. Evernote blogged about this here, and they also post their privacy policy online. As an additional security precaution, information within notes is encryptable.
Denouement
Evernote has been a great organizational tool for this psychologist over the two months I’ve been using it. It’s essentially a digital file cabinet that I’ll never even get close to filling – I’m a paid member, and even after syncing a ton of PDFs and quite a few zipped .wav files, I still only used 160 MB of my 500 MB monthly limit this month (free members get 40 MB/mo). Maybe a good analogy is to think of Evernote as an iTunes for your notes and documents – sure, you could open up separate folders and click on individual mp3s to listen to music, but isn’t it easier to manage them all in one central location?
6 January 2009
T3: Cutting Up in the Classroom
Rebecca Bell over at Notes from the School Psychologist recently started a blog carnival called Teaching Tips Tuesdays (or T3). This is my contribution to this week’s edition (but linked to last week’s T3, since there isn’t one up for this week yet), and will be cross-posted to/linked from her blog (I think!).
As an English teacher, I taught many sections of our tenth-grade English II course that were designated as In-Class Support (ICS). In these classes, we would have as many as 10 students with learning disabilities along with another 10-15 students who did not have learning disabilities. The goal of the ICS model is to allow special education to be as inclusive as possible by assigning two teachers to a classroom, one content area teacher and one special education teacher. The course content is identical to that of non-ICS general education courses.
Given the high co-morbidity rate of ADHD and other learning disabilities, it’s not uncommon to have students in these classes who comprehend the material well enough, but have serious trouble organizing their thoughts in writing. This can be difficult enough for 15-year-olds without any other influences, but when you throw ADHD and other SLDs into the mix, the writing process can become incredibly frustrating for both student and teacher.
About five years ago, I had a student who was experiencing great difficulty writing a research paper. He knew what he wanted to say, but told me he just couldn’t make sense of what was in his head to get it on paper. Rough drafts were due that week, so I told him to bring in a rough draft and I’d work with him after school to try to help him.
When we sat down together to look at his draft, I saw exactly what he meant. The paragraphs themselves were more or less focused on a single topic, but reading the paper as a whole, the topics shifted from this to that back to this again. It was incredibly difficult to follow his train of thought and the defense of his thesis.
I tried explaining why the paragraphs didn’t make sense in the order they were in, but the student wasn’t getting me. I don’t know how I got the idea, but I eventually got up, walked over to the teacher’s desk, grabbed a pair of scissors, and returned to the student. After getting his permission, I proceeded to cut his essay up by paragraph. I then asked him to put all the paragraphs that deal with Topic A in a pile (whatever Topic A was), all the Topic B paragraphs in another pile, and all the Topic C paragraphs in a third pile.
I will never forget the look in his eyes and the widening “O” his mouth made as he uttered he magic words: “Ohhh, I GET it now! Thanks, Mr. B!” He reorganized his paper that weekend and, if I remember correctly, received an A or B on the final draft.
Cliff’s Notes Version: Physical manipulatives can be great for getting kids (and teachers!) to grasp abstract concepts like writing or mathematics, and they can be found (or made) in the least likely places.