July 8 Creating Portfolios and Resumes with students with low incidencedisabilities

Writing involves many sub skills... memory, knowledge, language, higher order cognition, social cognition, spatial ordering, neuromotor function and attention. Writing a traditional resume with pen and paper or key boarding can be beyond some student's current skill set. Student's with low incidence disabilities may need to be taught other ways to develop portfolios and resumes.

There are several iPad apps that can be taught to these students such as ClickerSentences, ClickerConnect, PicCollage, Tools4Kids and BookCreator. This is a great example of how we can make resume writing possible for all students - UDL at it's best!

Each students' skills, strengths and abilities need to be assessed for an appropriate match to be made. When a mode of teaching resume building has been determined the steps for using the tool or app need to be formatted in a way that is accessable to the student. This may require the steps of use to be broken down, shown visually, read orally etc. depending on the student's needs.

In class today our group was assigned a student profile for "Leopold". Our task was to demonstrate how we would teach this student to create a portfolio or resume to help him transition from highschool into the community. Our group decided that because of "Leopold's" non-verbal autism, his rigidity and his challenges with gross and fine motor skills we would teach him how to use ClickerSentences. We created a step by step guide book in BookCreator for him to use to refer to when using the app ClickerSentences. Our group also created a book in BookCreator to present our student profile and rationale for using ClickerSentences to our classmates.