 Hello everybody. I'm Richard Ladner, the Principal Investigator for Access CS4ALL along with Professor Stefik from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. And today we're really pleased to introduce Sarah Cyrus from the Landmark School in Beverly, Massachusetts. She's going to talk to us today about teaching students with language based learning disabilities. I wanted to give her a hand to start with because she's she's the CSTA. She is a CSTA equity fellow this year, which was quite an honor for her. Also, I want to mention just briefly that we will have another event on June 16th, which is a teacher to teacher computer science education for neuro diverse students. So that you might also be interested in that one. So Sarah, why don't you go ahead and start. So thanks everyone for coming. As was just said, we're going to be talking about reaching students with language based learning disabilities within a computer science classroom. So, as Richard just introduced, my name is Sarah and I teach at the Landmark School in Beverly. It is a school entirely for students with language based learning disabilities. I've been teaching there for 11 years now. And in those 11 years, I have been teaching computer science for seven. We have a school of about 310 students at the high school level with a three to one student to teacher ratio. So we have a very small class size because it is a fully special and setting. My classes max out to be at eight. I've had up to nine in my classes before we serve grades eight through 12, both residential and day. And we have about a 3565 female to male ratio at our school. Our school also is has publicly funded students. So about 60%, I want to say, of our students receive some funding from their public school to attend Landmark. So we do meet all federal and statewide criteria for special education as well. So, I think it's important to kind of put this into the bigger context of special education. We have about 2,342,000 students with a specific learning disability under IDA as of 2017-2018, which is the most data that the most recent data that I could find. So if you are teaching a course that is honors or AP, the odds are you still have students in your courses who have a learning disability, even though you may not officially know that. Maybe they have an IP or maybe they do not maybe you're in a private setting or a charter. But the odds are there is a student in your classroom who has a learning disability. With that many students having a learning disability with 2,342,000 students having a specific learning disability that's about 4.6% of all students. I can only assume this number has grown in time. So I think it's important to approach this from a standpoint of anybody can learn computer science. There will obviously be an umbrella within that. But I think that all of our students, given the appropriate accommodations can make this happen. So my students here, this is my dodgeball team, the nerd herd, we did come in second that year. It was a miracle. In the year that this picture was taken I had 18 students split between three classes with a gender ratio that was on par for the school. And we made it through the year with amazing projects that came out of it I'm going to tell you a little bit more about them later as we go through. So specific learning disability is a widely varied umbrella. LBLD officially falls under that umbrella language based on disabilities. So, what is a specific learning disability. It can include difficulties with oral or written expression, decoding fluency or comprehension, auditory processing, working memory, dysgraphia or dyscalculia and executive functioning students with a specific learning disability could have an issue with just one of these pieces, or they could struggle with several of them, and every student will present in a different way. However, another important thing to think about to in labeling is that just as someone who is gender non conforming can choose how they identify a student can choose to use disability or difference and how they describe their difficulties with reading, or with language. So I'm going to talk about reading first. So I think when you hear the word dyslexia this is what people first think of. And students can struggle with all of these pieces or they can struggle with just one or two. I've had students who could read very fluently, who could sit down, read a whole page of an advanced text, and then still struggle to tell me what they just read it all, they would have a hard time recalling their main ideas their details, being able to connect information to the text. Decoding can also be a difficulty decoding is one's ability to break down a word that is unknown. So being able to break it into syllables and then read it, following normal convention. Oftentimes comprehension can be lost when students are struggling with the decoding piece, because they're working so hard on breaking the words down. That they can't retain what they're reading. So there are many different ways a combination plays into that. So working memory, which I'll talk about a little bit later as well, can play into this because when you are having trouble holding something in your short term memory comprehension can then also suffer. So academic vocabulary is another piece that our students can find difficult to hold on to and remember. When they've spent more time in their academic careers, getting up to a specific reading level academic vocabulary can suffer just as it does for students who are English language learners. So, especially in our field in computer science, where the vocabulary to be really domain specific, right. I don't think I heard the word concatenate for the first time until I was, I don't know, maybe 25. Students are are going to be encountering a lot of these words for the first time as well, or at least in this context right the word variable means something slightly different in this context than what they may have seen in math class. Fluency is the last piece that I'll talk about here. And that's the ability to read something at an appropriate speed while maintaining accuracy and reading with expression so those pieces all together for fluency, and students might be able to read quickly but with errors in which case again comprehension will suffer or students might be able to read accurately, but speed might be a problem, which then is the putting a lot of their energy, their mental energy into still remembering what they read when it's taking a while to get through it. So the two main pieces here are oral expression and written expression, oral expression can manifest as difficulty pulling up the words you want or need to express your thoughts I'm sure we've all had that moment where we're sitting and thinking like oh what's the word I'm looking for right it happens to the best of us. But for some students this can be a real barrier to getting their ideas across. When you come in and be really helpful I know five seconds doesn't sound like a lot of time, but when you're sitting in a large classroom setting and waiting those five seconds for a student to share their ideas. It can seem like quite a while, but just being able to think about that as you are talking with students and giving them the chance setting them up for success in that way. The oral expressive difficulties come into play when your brainstorming as a class when students are working in groups and in just day to day conversation, regardless of the topic. Written expression is where students have trouble with writing. This can manifest at in poor written grammar. While orally they may be able to get their thoughts across perfectly. This can also be evident in oral rehearsal so I'll have students who will sit down and tell me exactly what they're going to write and what they're going to say and then really struggle to get it on to the page. So this could be a barrier. When kids are starting to code in a text based language, and they have to suddenly be able to recall and be able to put into their development environment what they want to get across executive functioning. This is one that I think you can see in a huge amount of students across the spectrum. It is the organization of time information and materials. We see it often in kids with learning disabilities but again I think it's highly prevalent, even in those without the ways that someone organizes these items is so key to success. They need to learn these skills, but oftentimes they need to be explicitly taught. This is a huge part of how we, we spend class time, often scaffolding for success in this regard. Students with executive functioning deficits are often the kid with like the exploding backpack right if you've ever in your classroom had a kid unzip his backpack to get out his laptop and like 12 different items fly out and there's a folder with a million things in it. So for the kid who highlights everything on a page. When you're like, you know, why don't you highlight what's important and they just do the whole thing. I've seen that a lot. Or the kids who shut down at the idea of a long term project, even if it's something they love right, no matter what the task, just the idea of having to plan that all out can be really overwhelming. Students almost in tears over the prospect of having to tackle something like that. So they can really affect a student really severely. It can also present in our current digital world where I'm sure plenty of you are spending time on zoom and on a computer with students. I'm a student with a million tabs open and a student with a Google Drive with 50 items and they're all labeled untitled. I think that's my favorite right now. Pull out your essay. Thank goodness for the search function right. So those are the different ways you might see it. It can also be when a student has trouble organizing information. And because this is a way for them to gain independence, until they have the necessary study skills, they're going to struggle with self directed learning. So it's as simple as knowing how to search on Google, but it can also be as complex as having trouble taking effective notes in a lecture. So we can set our students out for success by explicitly teaching them those skills. So a couple coexisting difficulties that I want to talk about include auditory processing disorder. Auditory processing disorder is where students have a hard time processing auditory stimuli, not necessarily in the way that students who are deaf or hard of hearing struggle with it. But more so in a way that they have a hard time figuring out what's important in their environment. It can present as if the student is not paying attention, especially when given oral directions, regardless of how simple the direction is. I often see students who struggle with this at being a step behind their peers, or unsure of where or what they should be doing. This is where working in a multimodal classroom becomes so important. So I will often be writing things on the board at the same time or typing things in the chat. Just trying to present whatever I can in a few different ways. I can describe this to me as like currently I can hear a squirrel in a tree. I can hear a student in their backpack. I can hear two people walking in the hallway. I can hear the water bubbler in the hallway, and I can hear you talking and teaching me. But my brain like cannot tell me what I should pay attention to. So I'm splitting my attention. Working memory is your ability to hold information in a short term memory. I think a key way to think of it is to think of like a phone number. Someone's trying to tell you their phone number and you're trying to remember all the digits and the time it takes you to put it in your cell phone. So this can be tough for a lot of people, but for some students, it can make a real difference in their level of performance in the classroom. So it can present when students are given oral information and then asked to act on it very quickly. It can give a difficulty with multi step directions and it can also slow down work progress because they might need to reference new material more often until it is banked in their more long term memory. I see this with students as an issue when we're learning new syntax, a lot of the time, they'll have to keep referencing their notes and referencing their notes till it's more banked. It's the time, the time it takes for them to move forward with that material more infinitely. Processing speed is the speed at which you can take in information and then provide some output. A lot of times you'll see this in classroom just in everyday conversation. It's an instance where wait time is really important. Students may seem to be ignoring you or they may present as daydreaming would really they're just processing. And a lot of times, they struggle to advocate that that's what's happening in the moment they're still trying to work through. So you might think they're not paying attention, but really they're processing and they'll get there. So students can be affected by just one of these or none or they can struggle with all three. In addition to any reading or expressive difficulties they may have. They can exist for any classroom, any student in your classroom, not just those on IPs. These are issues that you could see in any of your students. So the next time you see a student like daydreaming out the window, you could give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they're processing. Maybe they're struggling to process the auditory stimuli in the room. So, these are another couple of bonus difficulties. I call them a bonus because they tend to be secondary to the other kinds of learning disabilities that I've talked about so far. And that is a difficulty with handwriting. Though it doesn't come up as often for me as a computer science teacher, especially since everything is is on the computer right now right even more so than usual. It still can be tough, especially when kids are brainstorming they're working on a whiteboard. I've had it described to me by a student as painting each letter individually. So every time he goes to write it's essentially like he's painting the letter G right has to think about the form and what it looks like. So, there are a lot of easy ways to help accommodate for that that I'll talk about in a bit. So, a lot of difficulty with math and computer science and math and computer science are so closely tied. So if a student is struggling to identify the difference between two numbers like a four and a nine, which are very similar, especially when handwritten. Or they confuse operators, like the modulo and a plus sign, right, those two can also look very similar. That can really mess up their program, which can then be really frustrating in turn, right, their logic might be sound but they might have swapped out modulo and plus. So that could be a real bummer. So this is prompted me to focus closely and asking clarifying questions when students are expected to find a sum versus a product versus a quotient to ensure that they know what they're looking for. And it can cause a lot of difficulty in standardized situations where a simple math error can then cause everything from on to be wrong. So those are things to think about as well. So, accommodating for specific learning disabilities. I want to talk a little bit about accommodation versus modification and accommodation is when you provide some change in the way you deliver instruction. So what you're going to do with accommodation is when the actual curriculum and standard being measured or changed to suit the students needs and abilities. There are cases when one or the other are both are warranted. Oftentimes, if you are working within a mainstream classroom. You will be working on making accommodations for your students. And that's important to think about how can I think about what is what's really being tested here, right, what do I really want to know, do I want to know if this unit can spell the word variable, or do I want to know if the student can explain and use a variable, right, things like that. I also want to talk a little bit about universal design for learning. So universal design for learning is the idea that making the curriculum accessible to all and not just those who have difficulties will benefit everybody. There are a lot of ways this can be done. And there are probably ways you're doing this right now without even thinking about it in this way. Right. But when the barrier to entry is low, that benefits everyone. So something to think about. I was once told by one of my professors in an assistive technology class I took that those who study assistive technology can see the future. For instance, the computer met computer mouse that scrolled using a rolling ball back when we use computer mice frequently was actually created as as an assistive technology device for those with limited mobility, which then became a popular device for everybody, not just those for whom it was designed. So, by thinking about assistive technology and universal design in this way, we can open up a lot more of the field of computer science by making it more accessible to everybody. So, the next few slides have a fair amount of text, so bear with me. But I think it's important because I want it to be able to be a resource to you. Okay, so when thinking about accommodating for struggling readers. It can be difficult when working in specific technical areas. It doesn't help that there are very few textbooks or resources that are written for struggling readers within computer science. I have come to two different approaches other than my classes. As I'm the only computer science teacher at my private school, and I created my own program. I might be a little luckier within this as I get to choose what I use. But as a result I don't really have a textbook. If I had to label a book as our class textbook it would probably be some of the O'Reilly head first books on whatever language we're working on. I have found those to be really useful for my students. They present information in a multimodal fashion with games, images, and text based information, but it's not in a condescending way. I'll share parts of the text with students that I think are applicable or helpful. But for the most part, I try to point them to web resources to find their answers independently. They can be a bit of a danger zone as they can also find materials that are too difficult and become discouraged. So I think an important piece is to be able to teach your students how to vet appropriate sources and how to use those sources. Some other important accommodations to remember include previewing terms and concepts with students orally prior to reading or independent practice as necessary. There are definitely times when they want to figure something out on their own, and I say gain more confidence and can handle more failure and struggle. But until that point, and sometimes even afterwards, it's important to allow them some familiarity with a topic before throwing them into the deep end, especially with text that might be too difficult for them to access. When accommodating for fluency, the most important piece is allowing for extra time. This can involve giving students access to the reading ahead of time, allowing it to be a homework assignment or lessening or completely foregoing reading entirely. Another way this can be accommodated includes through audio books. An important resource I found is something called Bookshare, which is a free service for students with documenting learning disabilities that provides audio books. It also is for students who are blind or visually impaired. So definitely check that out. That's bookshare.org. However, and this will probably come as no surprise to anybody. My students hugely favor YouTube. We have a YouTube set of tutorials for everything. If they could use it for everything, they probably would, regardless of their reading ability. You know, the bow ties in our dodgeball photos, we've learned through a YouTube tutorial right before the match, right. YouTube has a wealth of content, and it's fairly accessible. And it's free, which is a bonus for any teacher. So this can also provide an opportunity for independence for all students and allow you to flip your classroom, which has been a godsend this year. So for example, this can be really useful if your students might struggle with internet access at home. They can use, do a flipped classroom, or if they don't have their own device, you could get a YouTube downloader. If they have their own device, you could get a YouTube downloader for students. That could work as well. There are so many great coding tutorials on YouTube that my students have really, really enjoyed. So definitely check that out as a way to accommodate accommodating for comprehension difficulties can definitely be more involved. And hopefully with preventative measures such as previewing, you can cut down on dedicated literal comprehension work. And when I say literal, I mean fact based right as opposed to abstract of drawing conclusions making predictions. You can ask questions throughout the lesson, both orally and written to help you assess the students comprehension. I typically use a small set of paper signaling I want a short quick answer right I'll just cut paper up into small pieces or currently I'll use like a Google form with like the short answer section. Or even just say dropping the chat right something quick like what does I plus plus mean right what does that mean what's going to happen. And then I can just real quick figure out okay you know for the most part we got it so it's a struggling. And then I can go back and reassess as needed struggle accommodations for students who struggle with oral expression. And if a student struggling with expression, it can be evident fairly quickly. The best way to accommodate this is to try and take some of the burden of processing by providing language they can use. This can be in the form of a sentence stem. I like to project some on the board for everybody to see. It also gives everyone a better idea of what I'm looking for. It's also important to provide opportunities for rehearsal. I do this by having small groups and individual discussions of my students. I also have students keep journals on Google Drive, where they have to write about a given topic, their latest project or self reflections. This year I even had them do Google sites for themselves, which they really enjoyed it. I think it was just really a fun project for them to have their own kind of portfolio and also their own log of what they're working on. After that, we'll then segue into a class discussion where they have notes that are already prewritten and accessible to draw from as they continue on. I think it's really important not to force them to participate until they feel comfortable doing so. Oral expression skills are really important and they can be improved, but they also have to grow alongside confidence. Queuing can be also a very important strategy in the classroom, and I've been known to like mine and be ridiculous if you haven't seen my arms like waving all over the place currently. Typically my classroom doesn't even have chairs, so I'm like up and running around the room the whole time. But it definitely makes an impression with students. A lot of times, they know the answer but they're having trouble accessing the language to tell you. So using a gestural clue, such as spinning a finger for a loop can help jumpstart and provide the visual aid they need. You can also prompt with phonemic cues that the beginning sound of the word, or with the more specific pointed questions to help them access their knowledge. Written expression can be more difficult to accommodate in a computer science setting, though the most important and fundamental accommodation is probably already in place, that being the use of a computer, right, not having to rely on handwriting. Using a computer, along with dictation software, such as Voice Note 2 or something like that, students can work on these difficulties more easily than ever. For writing code, I often follow a process of my students that I call a task card. With these, I first do a problem with them, introducing something new along the way, writing a piece of code with them up on the screen. Then I'll give them a task with an example we just did, and a similar problem for them to do either in partners or independently. This way they have a template to work from and can focus on the concept instead of the syntax. Something else that's been integral to my classroom is JetBrains Webstorm. The JetBrains family of IDEs has been so helpful. It has a really beautiful integrated spell check. And it will even do things like spell check user created variables, so it'll ask, did you mean to say so and so? Like I had one student who spelled the word answer wrong as a user created variable throughout his entire program, but it was spelled the same way each time. And that is all that mattered. So being able to have a program that can help with that is so important because nothing is more frustrating than the student having the sound logic. The program looks right and it's not working because they spelled something wrong. It also, this IDE also will autocomplete terms and include a dropdown list of terms, which is really helpful as well. Some other ways to help with written expression include modeling your own thought process when working through a new problem. Students have to be taught methods of computational thinking and it's not always an area they've spent a lot of time developing, especially when their academic attention might have been focused in areas where they had more fundamental struggles. Right, so if so much of their academic history has been spent working on just learning how to read. This is an area that might need more specific attention to grow. Okay, executive function. Accommodations for this are so key because I think this is so prolific among students. It's probably the most common difficulty you'll see. And as we've already talked about it's the ability to organize time information material. I know, I know I love to procrastinate, but I have a system for myself that works after many years of honing it right. I was never supposedly taught how to budget my time. And it's something I had to figure out on my own. Students really need and would benefit from a discussion on the organization of time. We spend a lot of time in my class discussing how to organize their time in projects. And there are several steps to teach it so I would first give students a small class project. Which like this year we started out in scratch, creating games and scratch. And we mapped out our time for that project over the course. It was about a two week project. And then next, we moved on to creating games using processing. We actually use P5JS, which is a part of processing. And for that, they had to map out then a month long project. And we grew and built on it on each other and the elates of time got longer. And as time got longer, we plotted out their time on calendars. So I went around and handed everybody a calendar and said, okay, show me, you know, what personal commitments you have, you know, are you going to be away this weekend, right? Are you going, not that they have a lot going on this year necessarily, but in typical years. Plotting out, you know, what are you doing? What are you busy? Do you have a job? Are you working like all weekend, right? And then being able to say, okay, you know, I could probably get this piece done by Friday. I could finish that by Monday and plotting it out. And that's not to say that they have to live and die by that calendar, but now they have a better idea of like, these are the tasks I need to complete. And this is about how long I think it's going to take. And when they first start this, they might be totally off, but that's okay, right? This is the first step to learning it. So, next up, having computer science be such a project-based learning environment I think is a really helpful way to help students with executive functioning difficulties learn those skills. I think that it can be really overwhelming for them, but being able to help them break down their work in these project-based learning environments and in a safe space can be really helpful to their growth in there. Other ways to work on executive functioning include limiting physical materials. Thankfully, there are a ton of physical materials right now, and I don't know that I'll go back to having a lot of physical materials. I do allow my students texts and things like that as resources, and I've definitely had a few students who preferred to use text as a resource. But for the most part, everything is online, which has been really helpful. However, we do continue working on naming documents, file systems, especially if you're doing things like web development, being able to trace a path is really important in organizing your files, right? So that's something to continue working on. Organizing information is a little bit trickier. It's mainly tackled by providing them with what they need in clearly labeled task cards, small text selections, and YouTube tutorials. So I use Canvas a lot in my classes as an online learning platform, and I have folders and sections for each unit in order that we learned it so they can access what they want and need at any time there. And so that is a piece that definitely grows with time. Accommodations for working memory and auditory processing. And auditory processing are probably the most straightforward deficits but are the most involved for us. Quick easy accommodations can include writing down directions. I like to post what we're doing in the chat for our online classes or write it on the board if we're in person so that they can access what we're doing at all times. I also like to float around the room and kind of keep an eye, keep tabs on everybody and make sure that everybody's on the same page. I also very rarely lecture in my classes to the point that when I told my students I was giving an hour and a half long talk today they were like, can you, can you even talk for that long? Yes, I'll have you know, I can. I will also provide scaffolded notes if needed. So for doing something that I think is going to be heavier lecture style. I'll provide written notes with pieces they just have to fill in. I also, I just generally feel like it's a less effective way of teaching. I would rather they were doing and learning more by trial and error with me as a backup. Especially when computer science is an area that lends itself so well to experiential learning, right? Nothing, nothing like getting your hands dirty and writing a program or using some electronics. Another method for formation is to slow down your speech, which I have been trying very hard to do, but it's definitely not my strength and slowing down the presentation of information. So prior to working in a special ed setting, it never occurred to me how much that that mattered. A student will almost never raise their hand and say, you know, slow down, you're going too fast. That will almost never happen. So it's up to you to really keep yourself in check on that. So, this is where we come back to universal design for learning. Every accommodation I've discussed could benefit every learner in your classroom. The few accommodations listed here benefit students with learning disability, all students with learning disabilities, which is why they're not listed separately. What's key for students with learning disability is to have structure and routine in the classroom. And this is not to say that you can never deviate and have to do the same thing every day. But, you know, every day I provide an open air activity, some independent work time, and then like a wrap up. I would say we do a task card two to three times a week. And the other couple of days we update websites and journals. We do presentations every week as a check in where we can bounce ideas off each other and talk with each other about what we're working on. And there are days that I throw all of it at the window. And we spend the whole time talking about project planning, or days where we work on projects for the whole class. Kids really do thrive on routine and really like to know how we're going to start and how we're going to end every day. Another important way to work on it, working universal design for learning is to have group work and partner work. I think those are so such important aspects for the hidden curriculum. And by the hidden curriculum, I mean social emotional learning something we as teachers know is so key to success, really in any environment but especially so in an academic one. And there are students who really struggle to engage in that. And by putting them into groups and partner projects. This is a way that they can really learn those skills. It could definitely be messy and hard, especially as projects are more open ended. However, you can help by providing scripted language with students to help them work on these tasks. I have often pulled a student said hey like what what are you guys working on what's going on and kind of role played out a conversation to try and help them talk through what they're working on together and work through their differences. A lot of times it's just a communication issue and nothing really more than that and they just need the language, which thankfully we're there to help provide. So I wanted to take a few minutes and see if anybody had any questions before I move on to the next section. So if you could raise your hand and the, as a participant, or you can type it in the chat, or you can unmute yourself and ask. I do have a question myself though. Sarah. Yes. On the slide I can remember which one you talk about self advocacy. Could you explain what you mean by that and how you would incorporate that into your class. Yes, I am planning on talking about that a little bit more later. Okay, I can wait. You want to hold on to it for now. Yeah, there's a question in the chat. Let's take more than one CS class. Are the classes you offer for a full year. Yes, so our classes at my school I see my students for 50 minutes a day, every day, all year long. And I have up to three years of curriculum. Because it is such a small school, what I teach class to class and year to year varies based on who I have. So I might have in the same room, I might have a kid who I've had in their in their first year, their second year in their third year, all in the same room. I have I have that in probably both my classes right now, actually, sounds like the schoolhouse on the prairie. It is it really is. I also have, I'll have all four grades in the same room as well, though oftentimes it's primarily juniors and seniors. I've had the full ninth to 12 in the same room. And Nate, Nate has a question you want to unmute yourself. I'm sorry, I call on Nate because he had his hand up. Oh, I'm driving so I'm listening while I'm driving. Okay, yeah, just meet yourself for a moment and get back to you darling. Go ahead, Nate. Oh yeah, my question was about the accommodation versus modification. You know, as you said, you kind of got your own program running. I'm wondering how that's like what percentage you would say, which is more accommodation modification and maybe since you've been doing it for so long, how, how that's changed over time or not perhaps. So, I think that I have eased up on my students in explicit teaching in several ways. My students still stick to a pretty strict routine and structure for my students. Accommodation is more making the material accessible to them, and I have found that my students can do really well with high level material. I think the openness of their experience with computer science. They, they come to me with the abstract thinking skills and the creative problem solving that's so key to computer science in so many ways. So being able to just accommodate the material and the reading level and provide them the structure and the scaffolding they need has been really successful. One of the ways my teaching has kind of evolved over the seven years of teaching computer science is that I opened it up a lot more to let them kind of create their own projects. The first half of the year is often very structured, while I get to know everybody, we get our feet under us for all doing kind of the same projects in sequence. And then the last third of the year I'll say is more so independent projects and letting them really kind of dive in and take the skills they've learned the project planning skills, executive functioning skills, computer science skills and put that together and make their own projects and kind of help get their feet under them confidence wise right like you can do this and you know the skills you have the skills you need to do it. Hopefully that helps. Darling, you want to unmute and ask your question. Hi, yes, hi Sarah. Hello. Hi, nice to see you again. Hi, I also teach computer sciences through disabilities and with autism. And you said that you teach in a three to one setting. So our ratio at our school overall is three to one so I'm teaching an elective course. So my courses are often maxed out at eight. Okay, but I also teach two one on one classes that are reading remediation. Okay, so if you look at our schools overall ratio yeah. Are they alternate assessment or, or are you guys just fortunate enough to be able to give us students that you know take a statewide exam one on one or three to one attention that way. If we give students exams, a lot of them have accommodations for small group testing. A lot of them have accommodations for readers as well. We have some students would scribes but I haven't encountered that in my classes specifically, but it, there are students with that profile in my school. So we do really run the gamut of combinations, even in a standardized setting. Okay, I was fascinated by that three to one I'm like my lowest has been six to one, and they're all often, often assessment I never even heard of three to one, but thank you. Oh yeah, thank you darling. We're getting a lot of questions now I'm going to ask Sarah, some of these questions we can answer later, you want to. So before five of them now do you want to go on and then we'll get back to make sure that you get to answer these questions later. Yes, sure. Okay, so I'll continue, but we'll make sure to go back to any questions that are left in the chat at the end that are not addressed. Okay, so those computers there we go. Okay, so using these accommodations in a computer science classroom. I have talked about some of the ways that I accommodate already. The main pieces that I use. As I said are the Web storm ID ease. I found those to be invaluable. Though this year I've also used replete with my students, which has been really helpful. And given that we, my classes are hybrid. So I have some students in person and some online in every class. It's still a small ratio, but I'm still split between in person and online every day. So replete has been really great for that because it acts like kind of Google Drive like you can or like a Google Doc where you can see the other student writing in the program. So students have been able to work together still even while socially distanced. So before you go on, I just wanted to go through this list. I want to make sure that everybody knows that these slides will be available afterwards. And we all have your email and you'll have a link to them. Perfect. Okay. YouTube as I talked about is also invaluable. I don't know who doesn't love YouTube, especially for learning a new skill. I want to give a specific shout out to the YouTube tutorials for processing. A man named Daniel Schiffman has an incredible set of YouTube tutorials. I think we spent like a whole class, one day just talking about how great he was and his YouTube tutorials on processing. He also covers P5JS and all the different ports of processing. So definitely feel free to check those out. That's been my students love it and it's always been really fun. Quorum, which is a completely accessible programming language that's completely screen reader accessible as well. I've had some students use that and really enjoy it. It's super easy to get started and get right into making like your very own dungeon crawler complete with graphics. Definitely check that out. Block based languages. I almost always start my students off with scratch. Even though they're high schoolers, we do like a quick two week unit on it. And I have never had a complaint. They find it super fun. They can do really neat stuff. They can learn those programming concepts without having to go through and focus on language. Right, they don't have to focus on spelling. They very rarely will have to focus on decoding, which has been really helpful. MIT app inventor is another block based language that's really fun. You can I think they use it on iPhone now to make sure that Google CSP uses it. If you're teaching computer science principles. They use app inventor, and you can make your own apps and what do kids love more than their cell phones, literally probably nothing. So that's always a really fun one to try out. First by O'Reilly books, which I already talked about a little bit, but I love them I personally have done several of them on my own. And I find them to be just really useful and accessible language wise, but without being condescending which I think is really important because a lot of times, at least a lot of my students have kind of been burned by reading their mobile intakes, right being given adapted books and things like that, which can be kind of a hit to your self confidence right. So, I think it's really great that this resource exists. Project based learning. I cannot speak highly enough about letting kids like run free with a project, right. I love it group work, especially can be really fun it can be hard for some kids but with the appropriate scaffolding right, providing them the language to use. It can totally be worth it. Hardware, such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi also can be really fun for our students. I almost always do a unit on Arduino, and my kids love it. Being able to see what you programmed, make a light turn on, like what could be better right turning an RGB through the whole rainbow. Amazing. They love it and I've had kids do wild projects I'll show you a few as we move on. So, a growth mindset, I think it's super important to have in a computer science classroom, but realistically just in education. At all. I've had countless students who have had teachers tell them that they're stupid, literally have called them stupid. It seems so outlandish and unreal to me, but I've also had a fairly blessed academic career. I cannot imagine there are kids who would say that to get to students who would say that to a kid. But it's, it's real and it's out there. So, we don't want to marginalize their experience and I think it's important to hold that truth but also to show these kids that that is not true. They are not stupid and they can do this. And it's up to us to teach them that right learned helplessness can be kind of a byproduct of that, right, like, I can't do it why should I try. And being able to show kids that they can access this, even such a rigorous field as computer science is so important. And I think this is where your story becomes important. I personally came to computer science at probably the age of 23 or 24. I had one computer science course in college called our products, which was making art installations using crickets which were essentially arduinos. And I'm self taught. I learned by doing some online at x courses and if I reading had first books and from there. I now I'm teaching it to high school kids right. And so as a result, I don't know everything and my students know that they know it well, but I'm willing to find out, and I'm willing to do it with them, and alongside them. So it gets important to share when you make a mistake and share the ways you can get better and the ways they can get better. It's important for them to see you struggle sometimes and to see that it's okay to struggle, and that that's how you grow. So, a typical class. I've talked a little bit about this so just briefly be focused on routine time structure structure templates, modeling doing right, including students in the learning process, your students are the expert in their learning disability. They know what works for them. And if they are struggling to find what works for them. It's up to you to find more options. Right. What can you present them that can help. Maybe they have not figured out audio books are the key right maybe that's something that would really help. So, trying to present to them different options. On the right. This is one of my students Alaska, who actually made a jacket that use an accelerometer and an Arduino pro mini, I believe it was. So that the jacket would light up when you were running at night so it would be safer for running. So that's just one of the projects that they were able to come up with on their own universal design for learning. Again, I talked a little bit about this, but I think it's important to think work smarter not harder right. If you are implementing implementing these accommodations across the board for your students. It's even less work for you right then trying to find just the right accommodation do it across the board access for everybody is better for everybody. So, when you're thinking about universal design strategies. You can have specific written instructions. You can have clear rubrics, right. My students love rubrics with clear expectations, they're very explicit. I'll post in my canvas at the start of each project and say, you know, this is what you need to have. What do you do with these pieces. Where do you fall on the scale, right, what can you improve. There are no questions about what I am asking them to do. I often scaffold tasks. You know, here is a worksheet and I'm missing, you know, half of the text and you need to fill it out, or, you know, you're struggling with that let me find you a resource that can help. So, I've done certified exercises like the task cards I do right where we do kind of a I do, we do you do process right working top down individualized project based instruction. This is a place for students can really shine and they can create kind of their own work in what they're doing. I'm making failure okay. It's so key. Literally I mess up all the time I make mistakes all the time and my students love to make fun of me for it. I actually put my students who's working on web design right now. And he just made a website and it's just a whole website roasting me and it is so great because this kid came in and was like, you know, I just needed an elective and I didn't know what to take. But now he's made his whole own website from scratch and it might be a website roasting me, but that's okay. It creates a really safe environment for my class or my students know that like, you know, we can mess up in here and then we can take it and we can move on. Using multiple modalities is so incredibly important right being able to provide students physical materials to use or auditory or visual, whatever works best for them. And again, the students the expert on themselves. Okay, so I've talked about the safe classroom environment being so important. And I do think it is a key piece of the puzzle because if students don't feel like they can fail in your classroom. They're not going to get very far. I rely pretty heavily on hardware in my intro classes a lot of the time. And, you know, the odds are good that whatever they make for their first project, it's not going to come out right. It's not going to be exactly how they want it to be. And that's okay right it's their first project. It's their first kind of independent for a into this. And that is fine. The more we pick off as we go. The better we can be doing next time. So, I work hard in my classroom to be a model of patients and positivity. Though that's not always the easiest thing. Even though you know my students are a delight all the time. It helps also that we have resources for them to kind of explore their own interests and work their way through projects at their own pace. Sorry zipped ahead of it. Okay. Another piece that I think is really important is allowing students to take ownership of the learning process. I have one of the issues that I struggled with in my classroom is the student who wants to ask me a question all the time. Right. Miss Iris. What about this and I, I like to do reflective questioning back, but I don't know what do you think about that. Right. And then giving them a little bit of wait time. And, you know, I would bet that four out of five times, they can figure it out on their own in just a couple of minutes. And they don't really need me. Right. But they kind of need a sounding board to bounce it off of. So, I think that that's really important, being able to know when to help and when not to help right when to step in. Do they really need me right now. Self advocacy. As Richard brought up earlier, I think this is super key. We want to set our kids up for success in the future. I'm not their only teacher. I might only be their teacher this year. I might be sending them off to college next year. Right. Or into a trade or something like that. So I think that being able to teach them to advocate for themselves is so important. They need to be able to access the entire piece of the hidden curriculum, the entire hidden curriculum. Right. The rules we teach our students about morality, kindness, social interaction etiquette etiquette. Those are all pieces that we need to kind of impart more explicitly. And advocating for themselves can be tough for kids in the special education system, especially if they have struggled and have had less and stellar academic histories. They can be bruised or worse by their schools in the past, and to show weakness within this realm can seem like opening themselves up just for further scrutiny. So it's up to us to show them that this is actually a strength. I just today had, we had a senior event on campus, and I was sitting around with, I think probably six seniors, four of whom I had in class, either this year or in the past. They were talking about their plans for next year. Right. They've got either their, their trade schools or careers colleges on lock. And so they're talking through and they were talking about what they do for work right now or what they're planning. And they were talking about how they oftentimes don't want to disclose their, their learning disabilities to their workplace, because then they get treated as less than. And also part of a bigger conversation and a bigger shift that needs to happen. But I think it's still important for them to know that talking about what you need and getting what you need to succeed is not a weakness. It's something that can help push them further, especially in the college setting. If you don't ask for accommodations in college, you just don't get them. If you don't identify your needs. You don't get that help. And that can make a big difference. So self as teaching self advocacy skills can be approached in several different ways. And a few different strategies. I tell my kids to use your resources, meaning ask your classmates, look online, look around the classroom. You're, you're welcome to ask me, but I might just reflective question back at you. And you need to try on your own first. I'm more than glad to help them but a lot of times as I said they can do it. You can also provide them with question stems or search terms. That can be tough for students. I also will project up some stems or strategies on the board that aren't targeted anybody particular but you know, are you having trouble here are some different things you can try right until they can internalize that. I also try to ask them. I try to encourage them to ask for more time. Right. If they want an extension on a project. But do it appropriately. Right. You can't just say I'm not going to be done in time. Help. Right. You need to know ahead of time and you need to advocate for yourself appropriately ahead of time. Right. I want an email in writing. Can you give me an extension. So those kinds of things are really helpful and will hopefully push students to being their own best advocate. Sarah is returning it. I was wondering, could you go through these three case studies. And then maybe we can go to questions so there's some leftover. Okay. Yeah, sounds great. Okay, so I'm going to talk about a few students. One of my students is easy. She came to my class because she knew that stem fields were lacking in women and thought she that thought that she could help remedy that by taking my class. She did end up taking some computer science courses in college. And it's one of her minors. So that was really exciting. But she had a fair amount of difficulty recovering from small failures. And it was evident in the work she did for me and the frequency with which she asked me for help for things that she had the tools to handle independently that this was tough for her. So my first step was first step to helping her was making sure that she was aware of her resources and reminding her how she could access them. And then switch flipped when she found out that she could kind of tailor this to her interest. So she very quickly decided, oh, I'm going to make a portfolio website for myself, and she went above and beyond in this and did such a great job making it. She has a big interest in art and design. So when I brought up the Arduino Lily pads to her, which is a syllable circuit for Arduino, she immediately had a million great ideas of what she could do. And she decided to go with this umbrella. So this is just a Van Gogh umbrella that she sewed twinkle lights into all the stars and then programmed it to shine in different intervals. And she did such a great job and the first time this umbrella lit up. I think you could probably hear her across campus, because she was so excited. And she did it on her own right she did this all independently. This is doing. He ended up going to college for business and took some computer science classes in college, more kind of a data science kind of way. He was a student of mine for several years and he was actually the inspiration for the computer science classes he approached me when he was a freshman and asked if we had computer science and at the time we didn't. So, we ended up working on this incredible arcade cabinet. But he struggled really with follow through on projects he was the kind of kid who pick up a project started and lose interest and move on, hit a wall and think you know okay. That's enough. I'm ready to move on. If you're, if you're not. He often didn't want to get into tinkering. He was not, he wouldn't give himself the free reign to mess up a project, right. So being able to give him that time to tinker on something really helped. He had a lot of difficulty with executive functioning skills and digital planning to break the project down so sitting down with him and helping work through a schedule on a calendar helped to finish this up. He also worked with a partner, and that helped keep him on track as well. So he worked with another student in a different class of mining Joey, and they actually met together a few times out of class to finish up and they made this full raspberry pie arcade cabinet. The whole thing functioned. It was completely full size. They even built the cabinet itself with some help from my husband thanks husband. And it was just so great right he was able to push past that failure collaborate with another student, and get it done. And then we had a super fun earth you'd get in our classroom that whole year. Okay, last student I'm going to talk about Mark. Mark is a fairly new student to me I had it for the first time last year. But he's also the kind of kid who would spend his whole weekend making a project. He does independent engineering projects for fun, all the time he created a button at his house that you hit the button, and it turns on your TV turns on Netflix and starts the first episode of the office. He also created a dog alarm for his bedroom, so that if his dog went into his bedroom, it would start beeping wildly so he could run over and get the dog. And he spent almost all of last year working on an automatic plant watering system that used Arduino and weather data. He actually stretched him in this regard. He'd not previously utilized outside data in his work. And for this he had to take data himself from different plants and soil and evaporation to determine soil readings and what they meant, and how he should program the system to water the plants. I'm especially excited to be because I had him after the first lockdown began, and he ended up completing this project at home on his own. I got like a full these are actually screen caps from like a three minute video he sent me of like how the project works and it was really great. So he had a great job of that and he is able to move past the initial failures of this project. And even though it took him, I would say this project took him six months at least to complete. He saw it all the way through to fruition. So just getting to see that is, you know, just amazing. Okay, so where can you begin right identify student needs outline some combinations that you think can be useful and then implement as necessary. If you look at it from a universal design perspective then you will probably be more successful as well. Thank you, Sarah. And there are a few extra slides that will follow this but we'll just skip those for now and go right to questions. Um, so I'll go to the chat and go through the questions in the chat and if you want to ask a question, raise your hand, and I'll get to you shortly. Earlier you talked about these task cards, could you give an example of what you meant by that, the task card. Um, so a lot of times in real life. They would just be pieces of paper a lot of times like that I would even cut off so they're small right like I'm giving the student a bite size piece of information in a small task. And it was, it's often the way that I teach syntax in particular. So I will provide them with an example of a loop. Right. And I'll say, you know, I want you to be able to print out the num all the numbers from eight to 42. By threes or something like that. And I'll give them a syntax for it, and then I will set them free to try it on their own. While I'm then going around and helping as needed. So it sounds like a piece of scaffolding. Essentially yes. So it has like the scaffold they need of the syntax, along with a quick task in like a bite size piece. Any additional scaffolding. A lot of times it's generally like more like oral rehearsal and conversation surrounding the task. Online it looks more like a Google doc. So, another question that came up. Do you have anecdotal evidence that doing computer science classes and projects improves student skills to involve. And function. I've definitely seen improvement in my students over the course of a year. So my students because many are funded by their public schools to we also take data through. Take data for their IPs as well. So we have more standard benchmarks for it. But I will say that I see a lot of growth in my students from working their way through longer and longer projects. There are definitely different ways in which kids struggle, right. So it's a lot of, you know, figuring out what does this kid need right what what's what's the barrier here that we can help push them through. Yeah, I think that's okay. I'm trying to think of like a more specific anecdote. I'll have to think on it for a minute. Anyway, there's another question here. My class has 20 to 30 students ranging from sixth to eighth grade. The ability ranges of the students who read at a second grade level to the gifted level. Each HTML and JavaScript I really struggle with my students who can't read. I feel like I've tried a lot of things that you've talked about, but it just seems so difficult. Do you have any other suggestions so this would be somebody that is not really read, I guess, or read a second grade level. I don't know if you would counter that in your experience. Yeah, I would probably focus more on block based languages. But I would also recommend speech to text, allowing students to do speech to text into an ID might be helpful. A lot of times I found that my students. I definitely had students with reading levels that felt closer that range at least and being able to voice what they're working on has been really helpful for them. Thank you. Being able to work with a partner also could be really helpful right so pairing up students who, you know, maybe one student's a stronger reader than the other, pairing them up together to work on something could be useful. I, I'm going to assume you're, you have to do HTML CSS but so if that's the case then I would definitely look into using ID is that have more accommodation features like WebStorm. JetBrains WebStorm specifically is HTML CSS JavaScript. And my students have found a lot of success with that. If you can open it up a little bit more MIT App Inventor has a nice bridge where you can do it in block based language but you can also port it to a text based language so you can see both side by side, which I think has been a nice feature from scratch to a more advanced block based language, but also takes off some of the pressure of having to write out all your text as you're writing as you're coding. So that's a little bit. Have you used the code.org curriculum or, for example, computer science principles in your class. Have I. Yeah. I have I have used sections of it, but not all of it. And I've also used mobile CSP in my class as well. I see. Yeah. Hold on. And so many comments. Thank you. That's the curriculum. I have a technical question about computer science principles since you've done that. And it seems to come up a lot is that in computer science principles is a performance performance task that's part of the exam, you know, part of the exam and the students are supposed to do that completely on their own. There's a lot of direction in the, in the, from the college board about how to, how do you incorporate the accommodations that the student has on their say their IEP with the performance tasks. They put a lot of things in the college board said don't do this, don't do that, don't do this. Some of the things that you'd want to do as part of their accommodation might be on the list of don'ts. So what have you encountered that problem and how have you coped with that. That's an interesting question. I've not specifically encountered this issue. But I personally if it's in their IP. I would. I likely would do it anyway, which is maybe not the right answer. But the IP is a legal document. And if they are entitled to those accommodations then they should receive those accommodations. There's a reason it's there. I am not a fan of anything that's going to hold students back particularly when we know they're so capable of it right my kids are like I have students who are leagues ahead of me. In computer science, it's incredible. Right, I love it. So I would probably still accommodate as needed. I think another way around that might be to provide them with a create task of your own creation that is very similar, so that you can then work with them through accommodating for the task. Right, sit down with them and go through in detail and annotate and talk about what is expected of them in the task you've given. I would probably also create like a rubric surrounding it like these are the pieces I'm looking for within that right, how can you break this task down on your own, and how to do that and kind of attack the problem. And I think they have certain things you're supposed to be in the, in the performance task in the program like the use of functions, for example. So, and that that's kind of a, you know, when they use that notion in the college board, it's very, very general. It's not the technical name of a function in a particular programming language, but it's a very general idea. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, apply that. Yeah, functions are definitely a skill that I teach explicitly right like I will within within the year I'll go through explicitly and teach, you know, while loops for loops functions variables global variables etc. And then scroll flow, right. And we have projects that encompass all those pieces so that hopefully when they get to that point, they can use it independently and have the resources to fall back on to find out how to do it on their own without me. So this, nobody's raising their hand but maybe my, they like my questions. I don't know. And there's nothing new in the chat. So, I'm going to pretend that I'm a teacher. I have 30 students at the high school level, and I have two students just to in my class who have a learning disability of some kind, maybe you know this. It's a big spectrum of things it could be but they're different, you're not the same discipline, exactly the same. Do you get some advice to me as a teacher that has only two students with IEPs? I think the key point is to think about how these ways you're accommodating for those students can be useful to everybody. Right. I don't, I don't know a single student who is going to not benefit from having a sentence stem or a single student who is not going to benefit from having scaffolded notes or a single student who is not going to benefit from, you know, being able to choose the modality they learn in. Right. Do I care if my students get their information from a vetted YouTube source versus if they get it from a textbook versus if they get it from a website. I really don't. Right. I want them to be able to use what works best for them. I know that there are specific curriculum that we need to use at times but there are still I'm sure so many different modalities you can use within that. There are really great resources that are out there. And it's a matter of, I think letting kids kind of be the expert on themselves, providing them with options and letting them make those choices. I think there is an advantage to the project based learning that, you know, not all projects are done in the same amount of time and you know what I mean it's kind of like it's a little more loose it's not like everybody does the same thing, and they're struggling to do those same same things with their project, and they get to do their project their way. So that might be the big advantage to the project based learning. Now I for sure. Yeah, so I wonder if anybody has a question. If you want to just unmute and ask. Thanks everyone for coming tonight. Thank you all for coming tonight. And there's something showed up. We like your questions Richard. I should have kept my mouth shut. And I know that person who said that and she knows me. So anyway, thank you so much Sarah that was a wonderful presentation and I learned a lot myself, you know, like every time I talked to I learned something new. Thank you so much. And maybe we can stop the recording now.