A couple of months ago an instructional aide who works with our autistic children approached me about the possibility of finding a program that would allow her to create "books on tape" for some of our special education students who are at very low reading levels. I told her what I knew about at the time and that I would keep my eye out for anything that might work better. As I was completing a podcasting assignment this week using Audacity, it suddenly occurred to me that this program might work great for this. My concern with what we had available at school was file size and format. Even just a small chapter of a book would be a huge .wav file, and .wav's aren't as versatile as far as playback is concerned. Because Audacity can export to .mp3, students could consume these files in a number of different ways, and .mp3's are compressed enough that they wouldn't take up a ridiculous amount of disk space. Since every kid under the sun (it seems) has some sort of digital media device, they could listen to their textbooks on their music players, files could be uploaded to our school's website (abiding by copyright law of course), or audio CD's could be burnt so that non- or low-readers could have an excellent resource available to help them read.
I shared this information with our principal and special education teachers, and they seemed eager to give this a closer look. One special education teacher who works predominantly with our Jr. High students seemed very excited about the prospect and even brought up the idea of creating these audio resources to accompany textbooks from other classes, i.e. Social Studies, that involve a lot of reading.
This little experience has opened up my eyes a bit. As a regular education teacher who is constantly experimenting with new technology tools, it is really easy to get excited and think, "Me, me, me. How can I use this?" But to step back for a second or two and look at the big picture, there are some absolutely fantastic, and amazingly obvious, uses for these tools that others may see more naturally than me that could be a great benefit to a number of students.
I am totally psyched about the potential uses for Audacity as well.
ReplyDeleteAs a special education teacher myself, using Audacity will be a great resource and tool for my classroom. Let the instructional aide know that there should be an autistic consultant within your district that she can go to to get helpful resources. I have three students within the autistic spectrum this year and the consultant has been an excellent resources for teaching tools.
ReplyDeleteI think podcasting for special education students is a very good idea. I am a Special Education teacher and I think to using podcating to help lower level readers is good support tool.
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