Making Learning Accessible for ALL Students!

My family and I recently took a vacation to Mexico. We had a wonderful time seeing beautiful ocean life, swimming in the warm water, exploring the desert on ATVs, and eating delicious foods.?

At one point, a little before it was time to come home, my daughter and I were playing in the clear water and my daughter said, “I wish I knew how to speak Spanish better.” My response was, “Yes, I agree, it would be wonderful to be able to better communicate with others.” While, between my wife and two kids, we know basic Spanish, and many of the great people we interacted with knew at least basic English; our conversations could certainly have been deeper, richer and more meaningful if we were more fluent in speaking Spanish.

Can We Better Support Our Students?

This got me thinking…my wife was an English learner who only spoke Macedonian when she enrolled in Kindergarten. Her parents both immigrated to the US and did not speak English either. My wife has told me a story where she went to school and no one was there. She waited and waited with her metal, John Travolta Saturday Night Fever lunchbox, but no one came. It turned out that it was Labor Day, and because no one in her Family spoke English or were familiar with US Holidays, no one in her family knew.

My wife tells other stories of how it felt to be a friendly and gregarious 5 year old, but not being able to effectively understand or communicate with her teacher or her classmates. Unfortunately, this led to her being told to stand in the corner, face the wall and not say anything because her teacher thought that she was misbehaving.?

I have thought about the many EL students I have taught over the years, or the ones who enrolled when I was a principal, and how my wife started out with her own schooling experience.?Wouldn't it be great if:

• We could immediately help our students to access grade level content?
• Our students could participate in classroom discussions and learning activities right away?
• We could accelerate student learning so that they did not fall behind, struggle to catch up to their peers, or never be able to be re-designated as English Proficient?
• Students could develop a positive self-image and for their peers to be able to recognize that all students have strengths?

We have certainly come a long ways in being able to better meet the needs of our students; but could it be better? The answer is of course, a resounding YES!

BrainPOP & Accessibility for ALL Students

BrainPOP?is rooted in research & designed to meet the diverse needs of ALL learners, empowering every student to build essential skills. BrainPOP provides unique and equitable entry points for K-8th grade students to practice and apply complex, grade-level literacy skills while building critical content knowledge across the curriculum. The following are examples of how BrainPOP meets the needs of all learners:

• Audio descriptions (grades 3–8) allows learners to experience every BrainPOP movie through multiple modalities, which is especially critical for students with low vision, visual impairment, visual processing difficulties, blindness, or students who are learning divergent. For example, when BrainPOP movies have audio descriptions enabled, they provide added narration to the audio soundtrack to describe important visual details (about actions, characters, scene changes, on-screen text, and other visual content) that cannot be understood from the main soundtrack alone.
• Multilingual Movie Player, BrainPOP (grades 3–8) movies are available in Spanish and French. Complete movie translations (including audio and closed captions) will strengthen BrainPOP’s learning support for English language learners (ELLs), enabling them to build background knowledge across content areas as they learn English.?
• 微软 's Immersive Reader, gives students access to literacy-building tools like Line Focus, Text Personalization, Grammar Options, Read Aloud, Picture Dictionary, and Translation into 100s of different languages.
• BrainPOP ELL is BrainPOP’s comprehensive English language learning program, taking students from beginner level to advanced. Based on everyday social situations and including academic content, the leveled movies and their supporting features build upon each other while giving students the confidence they need to communicate in English.

Creative Tools to Deepen Learning

When utilizing technology, we want to ensure that all students have multiple entry points to understand the content, and multiple ways to demonstrate learning in creative and immersive ways. The following are some of the ways that BrainPOP allows students to creatively participate and produce knowledge in ways that deepen learning:

• Creative Coding?- Developed in partnership with Scratch Foundation & Vidcode , provides students with block and text-based coding projects spanning the K-12 curriculum.
• Make-a-Movie?- Make-a-Movie cultivates planning, organizing, writing, collaborating, and analyzing skills.
• ?Make-a-Map?- Make-a-Map invites students to make meaningful connections between concepts and reinforce knowledge.
• Pause Points?- Students are active learners in these checks for understanding and can type, speak, or draw responses.
• Challenge?-?Challenge activities are interactive activities where students can apply critical thinking skills related to the content that they have learned.

?? Back to School Success ??

As students are beginning the 23-24 school year all-across America, now is the time to procure the best educational tools to our teachers so that equitable learning opportunities are found in every classroom, every school and every district in America.

Let’s make 23-24 the best ever by?empowering kids to shape the world around them and within them.?

*The views and opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities within BrainPOP.