Wairakei School teacher, Kate Friedwald explains how information and feedback presented visually and orally in her digital classroom are designed to meet the learning needs of Daniel, a student with ADHD.
Daniel has ADHD, and what that means for him is that he prefers to learn visually, or through audio.
So all around the classroom and in our digital classroom, cues are presented in that visual way or in an audio way, so when Daniel’s looking around the classroom he can see a visual way of reminding him what his goals are, what he needs to be learning. Even if it is done through text, it’s written in a way that he can understand it because it might be written the same everyday. When he looks up his learning digitally, there’s a maths picture to show the maths learning he’s doing.
There’s a lot of video learning, and he really understands when it’s taught in that method.
Quite often, feedback with Daniel – he prefers it orally. So I will see his work. If he does his work through IWordQ it means that I need to give him that feedback directly, one-to-one, because I don’t see it through the Hapara dashboard. So when I would be writing comments on other peoples' work, sometimes with Daniel I just have a quick, that quick one-on-one catch up, and because the rest of the class I’m doing through Google Docs or through Inspiration, I do them in all different methods. It means that (with) Daniel, I can afford to have that time giving him that oral feedback.
When we set up the devices we really thought about needs of students like Daniel. And he has logged into his Internet, logged into his email, and we’ve changed our login time so he remains logged in. He’s not constantly required for that battle of typing in lengthy passwords and lengthy sign in names all the time.
I can leave my documents open (because). No-one’s going to get into it because I’ve got a password on my iPad, and it’s really safe and good.