 Hi, welcome to our lightning talk where we hope to shed some light on a serious issue that impacted the well-being of students with special needs. And leave you with some ideas on how you can make a difference using open educational resources. I'm Emily. I'm a special education teacher in Noa Tak, Alaska. And I'm Karen, an educational technologist with the University of New Hampshire. I specialize in educational transformation and using technology and OER to make education accessible and equitable is a particular passion of mine. It's a passion of mine too. I became a special education teacher in part of I have a learning disability in reading and writing. And not only I want to help my students with special needs, but also it's important to me to give them hope that they can learn, they can go to college and have a career goal. It might take longer and they might not know how to find their own resources, but they're no less worthy than students who don't have disabilities. Education owners often reuse the same photo copies and scan supplemental materials every year without realizing they need to update their access of the materials that reduce educational burden on students with special needs. And by accessible materials, we mean those that are available electronically and are designed to increase the usability of documents and other media for as many people as possible. These are the ones that will work with assistive technology. Many educators don't realize the negative impact that using these materials has on students. Non-accessible materials create extra tasks and takes a lot of time, energy, and support that a student can even start on assignment and leaving the feeling of frustration, anger, and hope on this. It's our goal today to help you see the cumulative impacts years of using non-accessible, one-size-fits-all learning materials has on students with learning disabilities and to suggest ways we can use OER to make small changes that can have a big impact. With the advance of UDL and the projects-based learning movement, educators has changed for the better. But not all materials teachers use not always have, because they're not available, but often cost. This is where OER can bridge the gap. Unfortunately, many educators remain unaware of the existence of the vast array of free and open resources or how to find them. The research suggests that professional development and pre-teacher training is necessary to raise awareness and use of OER. Many students with special needs have a language-based learning disability, which makes it difficult for them to read and process printed materials. This is different in how long it takes to get ready to begin an assignment between these students and their non-learning disability peers. May not seem too great in the primary grades, but by middle school, the extra work takes preparing to begin an assignment to make getting started, a daunting task, even having excessive technology and other supports. Their challenges only increase as they progress through secondary school and are expected to read longer and more complex passages and then write critical, lengthy answers about the content. While primary educators often rely on printed consumables, secondary educators and even post-secondary professors often turn to photocopying textbooks or out-of-print reading materials. And these materials are not accessible, even excessive technology can't always help. Then it becomes a exhausting, time-consuming chore just to get ready to begin the assignment and students aren't taught what to do when things don't work. We either perceive and figure it out or give up. Here's an example of a presentation I gave in 2019. It's not reading sentences. So how am I supposed to write a paper? What a PDF is not writing sentences. Reading sentences. Teaching degrees. Remains. Remains. Remains. Remains. Remains. That's what an inaccessible PDF sounds like. So how am I supposed to write a paper without that? So first I would have to go to ask Dr. Ashton for help and then ask the accessibility office for help. And then I have to email this PDF to an assistant technology person and then that fixes it. That takes a good two hours, maybe, if everyone replies back in time. And then that's motivation and time gone. The time is gone. The time of energy is gone. At this point I don't want to do it because my motivation is gone. I'm done. So it's frustrating when I want to do things at a time and I have things planned out because I have to do this for every single course I take and I take 18 credits. So unfortunately Emily's experience isn't uncommon. We've interviewed other students with special needs with similar experiences. Having to spend extra time on a regular basis preparing materials that were not accessible. Having to wait for instructors or support staff to respond to requests for assistance with accommodations to which the students were entitled. Or falling behind on coursework and having to take incomplete or even failing grades because the extra time and effort became too much of a burden. For many of us these issues become problematic around middle school and they get worse leading to a long-term consequence of our self-esteem, our educational and our career choices. Now according to the Global Diversity and Inclusion Report published by Microsoft, more than one billion people around the world have a disability or a specific need which makes accessibility essential to a positive learning experience. However, one third of students with disabilities do not have positive responses to how their school supports their needs. In fact, according to the Institute of Education Sciences, in 2011, six years after graduating from high school, students with special needs on average only completed two years of college level of education as opposed to four years for their general education counterparts. This same study found that students with special needs are more likely to enroll in two-year vocational or Technological Program, less than 30% of who enrolled into a four-year degree program completed their college degree. Unsurprisingly, this leads to a lower average wage and quality of life. And from my perspective, we got the message early in our schooling that we're not capable of more. Rather than teachers how to find our resources and self-advocate for our needs, many educators will dumb down the work or advise the students with disabilities not to take classes that might be too difficult for them. You can help by first starting to think about how you can bring more equitable experiences to your students and share what you've learned with other teachers and administrators. The link on this slide is a great place to start. We often hang up on the idea of equality and giving all students equal treatment, but equality doesn't always mean fair if it doesn't meet the needs of all students. That's why we need to focus on equity. Equity is about identifying and responding to the needs of each student about providing them with the tools and opportunities they need regardless of their abilities or circumstances. Even matter giving students extra assistance with unresponsive materials, it is looking for using the tools like accessible OER that already met the diversity needs of all students. Why makes one who needs the most help do the most work to see over the fence? Why does there even have to be a fence? If you get rid of the fence, then none of your students have to do additional work before they can begin their assignment. Now that's liberation. If this seems like a daunting task to you, think about one lesson you can start with. Now imagine if you take that idea back to your school and ask each teacher to do the same, just one lesson, and then to share that resource. Hey, suddenly you're building your own OER repository. Here are some links to get you started. These available as a handout for the session as well, as well with a variety of other links and resources to help you how and where to find OER. Remember, open educational resources are freely accessible, openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing your students. The OER Commons is probably the best site to start with for information on learning how to find and use OER. The CCCOER site is a great resource that you will want to bookmark. It has links to a lot of OER responsive and helpful tips to search efficiently. Thanks for attending our session.