New Ways to Learn
A cooperative program in Milwaukee helps learning-disabled kids with technology
By Walter Minkel -- School Library Journal, 1/1/2004
Pamela Penn, district media specialist for the Milwaukee Public Schools, and Diane Rozanski, who oversees the district's assistive technology program, have been training educators in the use of adaptive technology since 2001, when they recognized the need for specialized tools in the classroom. Those tools, which include devices that transform text into audio files, had already been purchased by the schools, but were only accessible to students in special education classrooms. That meant that kids with learning disabilities who were assigned to the regular classroom—approximately 12 percent of the student population—couldn't benefit from the technology simply because classroom teachers didn't know it was an option.
Penn and Rozanski have presented a series of workshops to familiarize educators with a number of products that boost kids' reading comprehension; many of the devices are designed to read written text aloud. For struggling third- to eighth-grade readers, for example, Start to Finish kits include a book, an audio version, and a CD-ROM version with the text of the book both read aloud and highlighted on a computer screen. Quizzes accompany each title.
Debbie Lopez-Prado, a media specialist at the district's Walker Middle School, for example, tells a story about a seventh-grade girl who "had decided she didn't like to read, but watched other children getting good scores on their Accelerated Reading quizzes. I set her up with the Start to Finish biography of Rosa Parks, and she came to me, excited, saying, 'I'm getting 90s on my quizzes!' After that, she was checking out books for the first time."
Lopez-Prado says that lots of learning-disabled students at her school have also been reading News-4-You, a newspaper that presents stories using simple vocabulary and rebus-like illustrations accompanying the words. "With it, these kids feel more successful as readers," Lopez-Prado says. (See sidebar for more tools.)
Thus far, Penn and Rozanski have trained staff in about a quarter of Milwaukee's 165 schools, with more sessions scheduled for this year. The children's services staff of the Milwaukee Public Library (MPL) got wind of the program and asked Paula Kiely, MPL's deputy city librarian, if they could receive the training, too. Kiely says that MPL's librarians "weren't really comfortable" serving children with learning disabilities "because they knew so little about how to help them." Kiely not only arranged a workshop with Rozanski and Penn, but wrote a proposal for the library's own adaptive technology program, called "Learning for All."
The project received a $25,000 Library Services and Technology Act grant in 2002, which, in part, was used to purchase books, software, and other equipment for MPL's 14 libraries over the last two years. It also funded 500 "Learning for All" kits (available for free to families whose children attend Milwaukee's public schools, as well as local institutions) that include simple items that can make reading easier for students with special needs. The kits include transparent report covers in various colors that can be placed over the pages of a book to enhance contrast and make the print easier to see for some students. Almost all 500 of them have been handed out.
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