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| What has been your experience with families of students with disabilities? Much of my experience has been with students and their disabilities. I am rarely invited or brought in to the IEP process. Rather I get the call after an IEP has been established and the assistive technology needs to be setup/installed. In some of the schools I’ve worked in I’ve been fortunate to work with special needs staff who have thought to seek my insight and consult with me prior to an IEP meeting. While I cannot comment on how a piece of assistive technology may or may not aid a student, this has given me the opportunity to provide information on the schools’ ability to implement the technology and provide constant support for its use. I have been teaching a 6th grade computer literacy class for the past three years now, and it has taken that long for the special needs staff to begin seeing the need to include me in IEP meetings that affect 6th grade students. In the meetings that I am now beginning to attend, I have become keenly aware of my inexperience with the IEP process. If I have a strength, it has been in helping other teachers to integrate technology to aid them in collecting assessment data. While my point of view has been toward all students, having read some of the literature for this class I see that this data could also be important to the IEP construction process. What kind of support is available to educators and staff to support the IEP recommendations? Our IT department and staff make every effort to support the recommendations for assistive technology that grow out of an IEP plan. To this end, we constantly advocate to be consulted during the planning process so that we can provide the team with accurate information with respect to our ability to provide the technology, a realistic timeline of when we can implement the technology, and our ability to provide maintenance and upgrade of the hardware/software. Even with our 1-to-1 environment in grades 7 and 8, our ability to respond effectively and timely continues to be a challenge. In these instances, I wonder if our IEP’s need to focus on using “trials” with non-specific technology types/brands as described in the ASNAT document we read. This might give us more flexibility to find the right technology that can be supported by the IT department, integrated into the schools’ technology infrastructure, and serve the needs of the student. How are students and families involved in the IEP process or in provision of assistive technology? From my observations, both students and parents are vital players in the IEP process in my school district. IEP meetings usually do not take place unless at least one parent representative is in attendance. The student may not be present for some meetings due to the nature of the agenda, but I believe student involvement is strongly encouraged during the assessment and evaluation parts of the IEP process. Student input into whether or not the assistive technology is meeting the goals of the IEP plan is just as important as that of the teacher. Since the start of Maine’s 1-to-1 laptop initiative (MLTI) in grades 7 and 8, I think parent involvement has become even more critical in the IEP process. Part of the mandate of the MLTI program is that the student be able to bring his/her laptop home during the school week. As a result, any assistive technology connected to this device is now present both at school and in the home environment. Therefore, parents need to be included in the IEP process so that they can effectively support their child in the use of the assistive technology when they are at home. |
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