What about the film ‘Mary and Max’. It has a sympathetic portrayal of
Aspergers and the character Max says that he likes being an Aspie.
From: SARA, Debra
Sent: Tuesday, March 19, 2013 12:06 PM
To: ictenglish AT lists.tki.org.nz
Subject: RE: [ICTs in English] Re: Teaching students with Asperger
syndrome or autism
Thanks
to those you responded re aspergers.
Very
helpful.
Appreciate
it.
DEB
Deb
Sara
BSDE
Teacher English 7- 10
Brisbane
School of Distance Education (BSDE)
07
37272617
dsara1 AT eq.edu.au
From: ictenglish-request AT lists.tki.org.nz
[mailto:ictenglish-request AT lists.tki.org.nz] On Behalf Of Malcolm
Law
Sent: Monday, 18 March 2013 6:46 PM
To:
ictenglish AT lists.tki.org.nz
Subject: [ICTs in English] Re: Teaching
students with Asperger syndrome or autism
Yes, this is an English rather than ICT subject but many
students with a diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome also like ICT!
As the
parent of a boy with classic autism, I've had the advantage of being able to
take some training in teaching ASD students and been in rooms with more
children with a diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome than I could ever be comfortable
with again. Also working at Te Kura, I've seen wonderful creative writing
from a boy with an Asperger diagnosis, which is counter intuitive. My view
is that students with the syndrome have some common characteristics allowing a
clinical psychologist to make a diagnosis, but they are otherwise as
diverse as the rest of the population. Autism, moreover, is a spectrum
disorder, that is the degree of disability varies from person to person.
Kanner Syndrome, or classic autism, is a diagnosis of profound intellectual
disability while Asperger Syndrome, as Tony Attwood likes to point out, is a
diagnosis which could be applied to most University professors!
I agree
with Louise about the problem teaching The Curious Incident to such
students. I would add that Mark Haddon told the National Autism Society in
the UK that he was not describing Asperger Syndrome. He could have fooled
me! From what I read, the year I marked Extended Text in NCEA, I'm less
concerned about stereotyping Aspies and more concerned that Aspies are being
patronised. (Aspies reject the idea that they have a disability. They see
themselves as differently abled.)
There is a book about teaching ASD
students, published by The Cloud Nine Foundation. I can't remember the
author at the moment. I only recall that The Cloud Nine Foundation donated
a copy to every school in New Zealand except Te Kura, the school which ends up
teaching a lot of ASD students! I think you're in Australia, Deb, but Cloud Nine
Productions moved to Brisbane about ten years ago and Tony Attwood, the leading
expert in ASD treatment, lives in Brisbane as well, so you may be able to catch
one of his courses.
Malcolm Law
On 17/03/2013 12:52 p.m., Debra
Sara wrote:
Dear All
This is more an English post than an ICT post. I am
teaching year 10 English and am struggling to accommodate students who have
autism or aspergers when the assessment criteria for Assessment Tasks require
students to identify values, social, moral point of view of narrator,
author , characters etc. Students with Autism or asperges seem only to be
aware or their own point of view - more or less. I think
(?)
I need to do some training in the area but wondered whether
any of you had any advice re this, at this stage.
Would studying a class novel such as "The curious
incident of the dog in the night time" be helpful since the main
character has aspergers? Or am I stereotyping these students? Is there so much
diversity in the group that no one novel would align with the group's views
and values? I suspect so. I think this novel is written pretty much without
connectives and complex sentences from memory. This is away of avoiding
connectives which show conditionality, concessionality etc which at least one
of my students struggles to show or to even see.
On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 1:35 PM, Hamish Chalmers <hchalmers AT ashs.school.nz> wrote:
A really
interesting post from Karen
Melhuish over on the VLN got me thinking
this week about how technology is reshaping our observation and collection of
our students’ evidence of learning. Karen was particularly interested in how
mobile technology is providing easier ways to capture thoughts and
observations of the things around us. She points out how technology can also
be used just as easily for collecting data and observations during authentic
learning moments in class.
This made a lot of
sense to me. In the flow of teaching, it’s important that we’re giving
feedback to students to enable them to develop next steps. We often do this
through summative assessment but may find that we’re a little limited by how
much time we have divided by the number of students we’re teaching and the
need to give face to face assistance, whether we’ve given some other kind of
feedback or not. The ways of using technology Karen is suggesting has some
rather interesting implications for how we give feedback, what this means for
the more formalised form of feedback (summative assessment) and the ratio
between the two.
I don’t know about
all of you but traditionally I’ve put quite a whack of time into constructing
summative assessments to give students feedback on where to go next. While
really rate combining this with more ‘on the spot’ feedback (usually verbal) I
haven’t really considered how technology can be used to make this short-term
feedback much more regular and useful for students. Imagine us and our
learners using technology to video or record (in writing or verbally) some
evidence of learning and then the following reflection. If we built these as
technology ‘habits’ with a class, both us and the students could have a larger
collection of evidence to look back on at a later date and consider whether
the attached feedback had helped, how it impacted them and again, the next
steps from there. This would be pretty awesome for student motivation from
seeing their learning developing too.
Research in recent
years has highlighted again and again the need for ongoing communication with
parents and whanau. Phone calls can be difficult to get right though, both in
terms of timing and specificity. We’re having to describe things we’ve
seen and this can often get so far removed from students’ actual learning
artefacts that the usefulness for the students can be lost. Imagine sharing
some evidence of learning (say a video of a student practicing a presentation)
and the students’ subsequent reflection and perhaps even some feedback from
other students and us in the form of comments. This could be in whichever form
of social media the student decided to upload their artefact to. Helping the
less tech-savy parents to see the benefits of this might take some time - only
one lot of parents out of my tutor group of sixteen responded to a recent
offer of sharing a google doc I’m using to track each students learning
progress. The possibilities are massive and if we can get the students in the
habit of doing the uploading and storing themselves, our time is freed up for
what we’re good at - giving good feedback and next-steps.
Building skills and
habits around these kinds of approaches can take time though and the benefits
might not show straight away. It might also pay to create some accessible
tutorials to throw at the students after the usual bombard of questions after
introducing a new ICT or activity in class. But there’s still time to start
these things! It’s only half way through term one! Assuming we’re not all
completely exhausted of course.
Hamish
Chalmers
Facilitator:
ICTs in English
http://englishonline.tki.org.nz/
-- Malcolm Law
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