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Teachers Write! is an online virtual summer writing camp for teachers and librarians who understand how important it is for people teaching writing to walk the walk. If you’re a teacher or librarian who would love to work on your own writing, we’d love to have you join us.

Technology—and especially the subset of technology tools known as assistive technology—can be an effective, if not necessary, element of the writing curriculum for students with disabilities. Assistive technology (AT) can be defined as a technology (including the training and support to use it) that allows someone to accomplish a critical educational or life task. Since writing is so integral to school success, AT is often indicated to assist students with disabilities. In this article, CITEd looks at how technology can support students’ writing.

You write letters to request information, request action, provide information or describe an event, decline a request, and express appreciation. In this article, you will learn about two approaches to letter writing, the Blame Approach and the Story-Telling Approach. You will learn the difference between business letters and therapeutic letters - and why you should never send therapeutic letters to the school.

Denise Gossage didn’t initially set out to write a book. Her recently published “Winging It” (available in local bookstores) evolved from years of keeping notes of meetings with doctors, teachers and therapists, and writing a personal journal about rearing a child on the autism spectrum.

Writing is difficult. Most writers could relate to the frustration expressed by this student. Writing is a complex process that draws on: our knowledge of the topic our ability to anticipate what readers will need our ability to logically organize information our skill at finding the right words our ability to evaluate our efforts the perseverance to keep working

Check out this collection of quality apps designed to help young children develop their skill at handwriting, sentence construction, or planning and drafting a story.

“Nobody Is Too ‘Anything’ to Read, Write or Communicate” The late news broadcaster Walter Cronkite catalogued the ills of the world every night for television viewers. But through the cataract of daily despair he always glimpsed a reason to hope, to be joyful about the possibilities of the moment and beyond. For the tens of millions of viewers who watched his coverage of the first lunar landing 40 years ago that enthusiasm reached out from their TV sets, when, at the moment of human touchdown on the surface of the moon, Cronkite shed his cloak of objectivity and exuberantly exclaimed, “Oh, boy!”

Despite the many daily challenges that confront them in their sphere, members of school district assistive technology teams nationwide share Cronkite’s enthusiasm for the vast potential of technology to change the lives of individuals with disabilities. Sure, the struggles AT team members face are daunting: lack of time and money; too many pre-service and in-service teachers without sufficient AT training; funding-strapped districts that are sometimes reluctant to approve teams’ AT recommendations for individual students; the reluctance of some districts to accept AT’s viability, and a continuing belief in a few education quarters that some children with disabilities may never learn to read and write. Fortunately, among district AT team members – speech-language pathologists (SLP’s), occupational therapists (OT’s) and others – the technology flame burns brighter than ever. Their enthusiasm still bubbles. Their thirst for information about the latest technology developments that may aid their district’s children is unquenched. And their conviction that no child is too disabled to read or write remains not only ironclad but often translates into a hard-won happy reality for the children with whom they work.

This academy gives the paraeducator knowledge and skills specific to the use of instructional strategies and methods. The academy bases teaching upon the belief that paraeducators must be constantly involved in the dynamic process of analyzing the teaching environment and individual student needs for the particular level of support, degree of adaptation/accommodation or modification, and instructional method that would best facilitate learning. The academy is designed to provide these skills for use by paraeducators supporting students in inclusive classrooms, resource rooms, or in self-contained settings. Paraeducators that attend this training will learn strategies to use with reading, math, and writing instruction. These strategies can be used in whole group, small group or individual instruction.