Today’s class started off by debriefing and sharing our thoughts about last weeks EdCamp.
After listening to each other’s experiences, we transitioned into our week 10 topic which is Inclusive Education Assistive Technologies. Linked here is a blog post one of my instructors created on this topic for lots of additional information.
To lead us through this topic, we had the pleasure of listening to Tracy Humphreys talk with us about her experiences. Tracy is the founder and chair of BCEdAccess. This started as a private group of Facebook and is completely volunteer run. The purpose of BCEdAccess is to serve the families of students with disabilities and complex learners all over the province of BC.
Tracy started off by telling us what her group hears from parents. These include:
- Denial of tech – can’t get FM systems, won’t allow students to use AAC
- Tech is always outdated
- Access to tech is hard and still problematic
- There’s no central keeper of knowledge around tech at a school or in the district, usually.
- There’s no supports to learn how to use the tech for parents, especially a bigger issue now with COVID but always important
Tracy shared her own personal story about her son’s struggles and mentioned how difficult it is for family’s to access support. She talked about how parents always try to advocate for their children, but it’s hard to do that if you don’t know everything going on with their child.
She then talked about the things we can do to assist a student’s needs?
- Read IEP
- Ask family
- Ask student
- What do you have available? What can you get? What will you need to advocate for?
Photo by Jess Bailey on UnSplash.com