The Arbor School has just started a program to bring iPads into their 7 class rooms. Here is a list of all applications by classroom that they started the spring 2011 semester with on each of the iPads. The Arbor School is a special needs school in Houston Texas. They serve special needs children with Cerebral Palsy, DownsSyndrome, Autism and Global Developmental Delay of all ages. Their classes have mixedspecialneeds students and are group by broad ability. This list is a greatsnapshotof how to use a number of different applications to engage a number of learning and abilitychallenges and “levels”. It was hard to figure out how to bestdescribeeach class’s”level” so instead I opted to define each class by what version of the Carolina Curriculum they are using. See Classroom Curriculum Level Chart below The names are moredescriptivethan the editions however I had both set of information so I included both. The columns are not in order of ability, they are just how they came to me. In order of ability the columns would be A, C, G, D, E. F and CC are even morespecializedclasses, severelyphysicallychallengedand Autismrespectfully. I asked the head teach of Arbor how she finds their apps and here is her answer:
“I look for the “Free” ones first because there are some good ones. I could spend hours looking but don’t want the students to be overwhelmed with too many.” – Head Teacher at Arbor
Arbor School 2011 Spring Semester iPad Application List
The table below includes 51 applications. You can change the number of apps you see in the table using the drop down at the top of the table. You can also scroll through the pages of apps using the arrow keys at the bottom of the chart.
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Curriculum Level Chart
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Notes:
The concepts of level and ability are relative to each child. So it is very hard to express then in such board terms. I struggled to express these concepts in the above article. If you have a better methodology, comments orthoughts,pleasecontact us. Also the head teacher is in room D so her iPad has themajorityof the apps on them for her use notnecessarilyfor the students.