laptop computer spins onto the screen opens and displays atp education program webinar series closes and then spins off the screen hello and welcome to this video on assistive technology supports for students who struggle with organization this is one of my all-time favorite topics because everybody has unique organization systems and things that work for them and it's always super exciting to work with students to find systems and tools that are going to help them out we are going to talk about both high and some low-tech organizational tools today and i'm excited to get started my name is cassie frost i'm an assistive technology specialist behavior specialist problem solver collector of things that may come in handy and a believer that everyone can learn you can reach me at my twitter handle below and i will also include my email on the last slide when we're talking about organization both at home and in school for a student there's a lot of things to take into consideration the very first one is the difference and inclusion of home environment and personal spaces our students are coming to us with organizational systems that they've grown up with in their home environment and organizational systems that they have developed also in their personal spaces it's important to recognize and honor that they already have systems that work well for them so it may be difficult sometimes to begin to work on new systems and new organizational practices in a school there are many different areas that need to be organized desks lockers and even students digital worlds unfortunately we have been very quickly moving into more and more digital learning i say unfortunately not because the digital learning is unfortunate but because many students haven't had time to develop organizational systems for their digital worlds expectations around organization vary greatly from culture to culture family to family school to school and classroom to classroom this means that what is expected for a level of organization in a student's home may be very different than a level of organization expected at school students who struggle with executive functioning may further struggle if the organizational systems are very different and if they're not taught with some consistency that brings me into our next point of interest which is changing consistency it's very easy to make changes to organizational systems for ourselves we may decide that we want to move our drawers around we may want to move our bookshelves around but because we're making those changes for ourselves we're aware of the change we're making them with very conscious effort when we change an organizational system and expect a student to follow along it can be very difficult because this is changing their routine this is changing their habit and the things that they go through on a regular basis so for example while we may choose to organize our materials one particular way if we ask students or expect that students are going to be keeping things in a folder and later decide that we want them to use a binder or a different type of folder that change is going to make the organizational system more difficult for a period of time while students learn the new system along with that comes the idea of direct instruction we need to make sure that if we are requiring students to use a specific organizational system or if we're working with students on developing their own organizational system that we go through the process of direct instruction instructing a student on how to use an organizational system why we are using that organizational system and developing a routine around it so we are going to start off looking at our digital world and looking at tools and techniques and assistive technology that will help support organization in a digital the first couple things we're going to look at are chrome extensions these are a couple of chrome extensions that work really well in the category of organization simply because they help organize a couple of things that tend to get a little out of hand online the first one is extend or not extensions i'm sorry the first one is tabs so as you can see i have a whole bunch of tabs on the top of my screen often students end up in the same category so for example if they're doing a research project on frogs in science class they may have a whole bunch of tabs open about frogs if they are math class maybe they have their online textbook and a online calculator and some like online note paper all open for math class how to keep track and organize all of these sites and places that we need to be one way that you can do this is with an extension called tab cloud so the way the tab cloud works is you click on the little cloud on your screen and it's going to give you a list of all of the browser windows that you currently have open you can see i have a few here because i have multiple screens most likely your students are going to only have one if you have a group of tabs open that you want to keep together you simply can go up and click to name them so i'm going to call these demo once i've done that i can click the save button this now will bring this group of tabs down here with the title next to them so if later on i want to go back and open up the same group of tabs again i simply can click on the cloud find my demo group of tabs and click plus it's going to open up a new browser window with all of those tabs ready to go this is a really easy way for students to organize a bunch of information a bunch of websites all at one time to be able to open them and keep them together another chrome extension is actually used to organize extensions now this one students may or may not use depending on how many extensions are involved in their day teachers i do know tend to use it a little bit more so i think it's important to bring up extensity is an extension that manages extensions by clicking on extensity you can see all of the extensions that i have added to my account if the extension is gray it means that extension is not currently active if i click on the extension it will turn it on and show it up back on my toolbar when i click on it and it turns gray it means that i have turned that extension off what's really nice about this is it helps keep your toolbar organized so that you can find the extensions that you need but you still do have access to those others very quickly if you do need them down the road some other things about google chrome chrome is a really great browser for organization if you know how to use all of the tools that are available to you one of the first things that i will work with students on is organizing their bookmarks our bookmarks bar live up on the top of our screen and typically will hold anywhere between five and eight bookmarks at one time as you can see on my toolbar or my bookmarks bar up here you will see that i have quite a few more than that available to me this is because you can actually edit your bookmarks name so what works really well for this is to be able to go ahead and right click and edit and it will allow you then to rename your bookmark this is really exciting because for example if a student has an online textbook you can actually call it math book if you would like it's now going to call it math book on the bookmarks bar instead of maybe the longer name that automatically shows up when a student saves the bookmark additionally if the student knows the icon so if this icon is super familiar you can even go as far as deleting the words all together and just the icon will remain what's nice about this is it allows a student to have more bookmarks on their bookmark bar so you can name them something that's easier for the student to identify and they can have more things that are available visually at a glance along with that you can also manage and organize your bookmarks as you can see i have a whole bunch of folders up here on the top so i've actually moved my bookmarks into each category so your students could have one folder that's math one that's english one that's science one that's social studies and when they click on that they then will be able to see all of the bookmarks that are saved into that folder meaning it's easier for them to find the places they need to be online and we all know that when it comes to students online life the quicker they can get where they need to be in a classroom the less likelihood it is that they are going to be doing something else or moving somewhere else online that we weren't expecting them to go a couple of other features on google chrome that are less used but super helpful one is to pin a tab what that means is it will take a tab and it will pin it or keep it stuck to the side of the top of the browser so for example if i want to pin this tab i will right click and i will click pin it now makes it smaller but it will always keep it here on the side every time i open this browser window this tab will automatically open for me and stay pinned right over here on the side so you can pin three or four tabs oftentimes i will have students pin things like their email and their calendar so every time they open a browser window their email and their calendar will open up pinned on the left hand side so they don't have to think about opening those they're just always there another newer feature of chrome is being able to group tabs the way that works is to right click on a tab and i then can go ahead and say add tab to a new group i can name it i want demo and i want this tab to be or this group to be blue and now i can add other ones simply by dragging them in this is all my demo tab and if i'm not currently working on this i can click it and it will minimize it so here again i can add this to a current group or i can create a new group maybe this one is going to be science you can add others kind of by dragging them in so now i have my science tab so if the student takes the time to do this with their tabs on the top when they are maybe in english class they can all open their english tabs when they're in science class they can open their science tabs this is all about keeping their websites organized getting to them quicker so that they are not other places online and they can get back to learning quickly so just within chrome it's very easy to make some changes that allow students better access to their chrome extensions to their bookmarks to their websites that they need to go to and keep them organized in a way that students can very quickly and easily get where they need to go when we're looking at ios tools so ios has some built-in and some add-on tools that work really well for organization the very first one is called a rocket book this is a notebook that you buy and there's a multiple varieties of these some of them are normal looking notebooks some of them you can wipe off the pages and reuse them but the way this works is you can write on the page and there are little boxes or icons at the bottom of each page and you can set them up so that when you check each box you can then scan the page with their rocketbook app ios app and it will automatically scan whatever is written on that page to its assigned location so for example one icon maybe your google drive one icon could be your email another icon could be a google drive or a um you know icloud drive so simply by checking which boxes which places you want it to go when you scan it it will automatically go those places for you so it's a really easy way to take handwritten or physical things and turn them digital ios cameras are great they're good for as a qr code reader and also great to organize some of the things that you need to remember so for example if you have a whole bunch of things that you've written down that you need to keep track of it's very easy then to take a picture of it it's stored on your device where you can get at it very easily with ios cameras and albums you can also go ahead and make separate albums and move pictures into different albums so you could exam for example you could have students keeping pictures of all of their science projects steps in one folder so an ios camera and the picture app is super powerful for organization the last ios tool that i want to talk about for organization is called post-it this is a really easy way to kind of merge the worlds between digital and the physical world of post-it notes so in this app you can create digital post-it notes and kind of put them on different boards so you can pick one board and add post-it notes and move them around but more importantly you can also write physical post-it notes so just the normal sticky ones that you use every day and you can take a picture of them with your camera in the posted app and it will actually add the physical post-its as digital post-its so it's a really nice way for students to kind of merge both that digital and physical world while working on organizing their thoughts so in addition to all of the high tech thing we also need to look at our low tech world things that our students are interacting with all day most often these are also things that students have systems for in their own homes they have storage things in their own homes in their bedrooms in their living rooms in their kitchens they're used to interacting with storage right so whether it's where they keep their silverware where they keep their books or they keep their laundry they're used to storage options so at school some different things that you can consider is having folders these are pretty normal we use folders for a lot of things a couple of neat ideas would be to take one set of folders and put it inside of another set of folders so what that means is take one folder open it up put another one inside and you can then staple them together to develop a four pocket folder you also can do things like creating binder systems so in addition to a student having a binder maybe with loose leaf paper you also can take folders and if you take where the little circles are you can put a little cut with scissors and they'll actually snap especially if they're the plastic folders right into that three ring binder if you don't have the plastic folders you can just open and close the binder to put the folders in but for some students having a binder system that includes folders loose leaf paper maybe some tab separators it really allows them to keep everything together desk organizers having little containers or bins inside desks allows student to keep things in the correct places same thing with locker organizers and pencil cases it's important to note as i'm talking about storage options not every student is going to need all of these or is going to be successful with the exact same system when it comes to storage options it's really important to work with a student to find a system that works for them it's also important to remember that what system works this school year may not be the system that's going to work as well next year this is because different teachers have different systems in place and it could be that the student has changed some of their routines as well i like to think about this as the way that most of us will change our system of storage in our closet or in our kitchen every few years just because the way it's at currently doesn't work as well in future years another low-tech thing to really be aware of are labels and visuals and if you've watched any of the other videos on executive functioning you've heard me use the word visuals many many many times for organization there's a few things that you can do the very first one is to always label drawers label closets label anything that something should go into this really helps students make sure that they know where things go and keeps them organized have specific places for everything don't just keep scissors somewhere around the classroom have a place that scissors go have a place that extra pencils go have a place that extra paper lives have a place that lined paper lives take some time around your room and if you find something and it's you don't have an exact place for it find one keep it there it's great for students it helps keep them organized it demonstrates and practices the process of organization and it will save you time in your classroom color coding is an amazing trick and tool go ahead and color code things in your classroom as much as you are able to and help your students do the same perhaps everything for english is blue that's the themes you have blue folders blue notebooks maybe then your bookshelves have blue labels maybe your writing paper has a blue label maybe you can even work with your students i have some students who will take a blue marker or a blue sticker and put it on the corner of every english assignment so they use a blue marker and draw a blue smiley face on the corner of every english assignment that way when they're cleaning out their folder they can very easily add a glance see which things are their english picture of everything in its place this is kind of that beginning with the end in mind type theory if you want students to keep their desk organized take a picture of their desk when it's organized and tape it to the inside of their desk this especially works really well for our younger students with the flip top desks take a picture of the desk when it's clean and where everything's supposed to be and put that picture on the inside of their desk when it's time to organize their desks at the end of the day or at the end of the week they can look at that picture and know where everything should be in order for it to be organized locker organizers i always put on here as many times as possible because those are one of those things that you know they open up and everything falls out providing labels and visuals of what a locker should look like and having specific organizers so everything has a place is key as always there are so many different organizational methods and systems and i hope i've given you a few ideas of some low and some high tech things that will work as assistive technology to help students who struggle with organization please join for the rest of the video series on executive functioning thank you for watching for more information on the atp education program please visit our website at atp.nebraska.gov forward slash education or email us at atp.education at nebraska.gov
2022-01-10