In this week's readings, I appreciated the point made in A Summary of the Evidence on Inclusive Education (Hehir, 2016) that there is a difference between integration and inclusion of students with differing-abilities within a classroom setting. While integration has become standard practice in most schools these days, the same cannot always be said for inclusion. The article points out that not all obstacles to inclusion are political or financial in nature, but some come down to a simple lack of time for teacher training or even, unfortunately, negative perceptions regarding students with differing abilities and the additional time and effort it would take to implement assistive technology into teaching methods.
This is one reason I enjoy being a media specialist so much; my job requires me to constantly learn and train professionally on how to integrate technology into education- not just within the classes I teach during my specials rotation, but also in ways I can share quickly and easily with other educators in my building. It's been my experience that many of the tools I share with teachers, parents and students are easy to implement- sometimes just requiring a feature to be toggled within a setting- but are infrequently used simply because teachers aren't always aware of them.
Two great examples of such easy to implement tools can be found within an online meeting forum we all become very familiar with during the past year of virtual learning during the pandemic- Zoom. Both features can be found and enabled within the account settings, and once enabled, require little other preparation or effort.
The first is a feature that enables non-verbal communication. In my experience with Zoom, I found that, ironically, emoticons allowing students to raise their hand, clap, cheer or give a thumbs up are automatically enabled but within the same area in the account settings, there is another non-verbal communication option that, at least in my meetings, starts out as automatically disabled. This non-verbal communication feature allows students to request teachers to slow down, speed up or respond 'yes' or 'no' depending on their level of understanding. While this feature is described as a way for students to communicate without having to interrupt their teacher, it could also prove beneficial for non-verbal students or those with learning disabilities who would rather communicate their difficulties privately rather than drawing attention to themselves.
Another easy feature within Zoom is directly geared towards students that are hearing impaired; the ability to turn on Closed Captioning within Zoom meeting settings. Turning on this feature allows the presenter to have their speech automatically transcribed by the Zoom software. And while Zoom does include an important disclaimer that the accuracy of the transcription depends on the clarity of the speaker, amount of background noise and other features, I have personally found this tool useful and had few problems with accuracy. Below are some screen captures of where to find and enable this tool within settings and also a still shot demonstration of the software at work.
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