FOS Special Education partnership - ER16 Read & Write Gold project update: PLC 2

Reading Across the Curriculum with Read and Write Gold

FOS Special Education Partnership – PLC 2

Teachers from Thorncliffe P.S. and Valley Park M.S. met for their second PLC with Deanna Cape, FOS Consultant for ER 16, Valia Reinsalu, Itinerant Teacher for Assistive Technology and Christine Harvey Kerr, SEA Consultant.

Teachers had the opportunity to share their successes about the use of Read and Write Gold in their classrooms.  Interestingly, in sharing their successes, teachers also highlighted the ways they had addressed some barriers to AT use.

It was exciting to hear about the ways, teachers were incorporating RWG into their classrooms:

·     Revisiting the electronic text of a novel and highlighting key ideas and evidence

·     Using play back and the picture dictionary while reading electronic text

·     Using play back to listen to students’ own writing as part of the revision process

·     Using the vocabulary tool to generate visual vocabulary lists for units of study

PLC 2 allowed teachers to explore how RWG tools could be used in different ways to support reading a variety of texts:

·     Use colour coding and highlighters for process of elimination when answering multiple choice questions (pink – rejected answer, yellow – best answer) and when answering multi-step math word problems (green – given information, blue – actions to complete)

·     Use the picture dictionary to insert images into math problems to support understanding of key terms

·     Use colour coding and highlighters to identify and extract facts and opinion from a science article

·     Use scan to file option to convert a PDF scan of a textbook into a word document to chunk the text and allow students to use highlighting tools and picture dictionary

·     Copy text from a website into a Word document to allow students to insert text boxes and use text to speech and the word wizard to complete the activity

We are looking forward to the sharing of success stories and resources created for reading across the curriculum with RWG at our next session at the end of January.