Is your LMC meeting the needs of ALL your students?

What about students who have mobility impairments, visual or hearing impairments, or learning disabilities—whether permanent or temporary, diagnosed or undiscovered? These needs may be visible needs, such as students who use wheelchairs or crutches, students who use hearing aids or use American Sign Language to communicate, or students who wear thick glasses or need enlarged type to read well. The needs may also be invisible: students with dyslexia, students with emotional problems, students who struggle with reading, writing, or speech. It may also include students whose native language is other than English.

The flexible key word searching capabilities in SUNLINK enable teachers and students to locate special needs materials with ease. For example:

• Students with hearing impairments can benefit from closed caption videos. Search: “closed captioned” in the Quick Search field, “Audiovisual” in the format field, and subject of choice.

  Note: closed captioning can be beneficial to many students and adults who are having difficulty with reading. “Students using captioned materials show significant improvement in reading comprehension, listening comprehension, vocabulary acquisition, word recognition, decoding skills, and overall motivation to read.” (Eric Digest ED372662)

• Students with vision impairments may be able to read large print books. Search: “large type” in the Quick Search field, “books” in the format field, and author, subject and/or title to be more specific.
• Students who have trouble reading or who have vision impairments may benefit from audio. Search: “spoken recordings” in format, and author, subject and/or title to be more specific.
• ESL students may benefit from materials in their own language, or from audio and/or visual materials. Search: native language in the language field and/or “spoken recordings” or “audiovisual” in the format field combined with author, subject and/or title to be more specific.
• Students with mobility impairments may be using an adaptive keyboard like Intellikeys. SUNLINK has produced a template to use with Intellikeys. You can find it and other resources for helping students with cognitive and physical disabilities at: http://www.paec.org/fdlrstech/ua/resources.html.

Keep this SUNLINK information sheet with the FDLRS/TECH document describing “The Top 10 Classroom Technology Strategies” [PDF:1.7MB / 4 pages] for assisting students with special needs. SUNLINK could be Number 11! And all the classroom strategies will work in the library media center as well. For more resources, more information about FDLRS/TECH, or the name of your local FDLRS contact, see http://www.paec.org/fdlrstech/.