Ways to get more Teachers and Support Staff comfortable with Apple

start small and impactful - airdrop, markup, live/burst photo, shortcuts

slowly increase in importance and rigor

also, find your teacher that everybody looks up to - get with them and the rest with come with time :)

good luck!!

Could you have an allocated slot during staff meetings to introduce teachers to accessibility features that they might find useful for their students in the classroom? Things like speech to text, screen reader, reader view on websites.

Hello Callen,

To answer your questions would require more information specific to your building and district. I will share what I shared this morning with staff in my district.

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Hello Elementary Special Education Colleagues,

Attached is a Pages file from Apple with 10 graphic organizers. They are visually appealing and have some great accessibility features. Here are the following graphic organizers that you can find and use with your students:

• KWL
• Two topic Venn diagram
• Three topic Venn diagram
• "Hamburger" paragraph
• Timeline
• Mindmap
• Cause and effect
• Vocabulary graphic organizer (2 different options)
• 5 Senses Descriptions Topic

Once you open the file, I think you will see that some or many of these could be put to use with your students right away. Plus, if you save it as a template, you/your student(s) can bring up a blank copy of the organizer each time.

If you want to share this document directly with students, the link is below.

https://seeddownload.cdn-apple.com/s3/prod/ATLC/package/T033530A-en_US/1f0e0408-0479-451e-8480-52f22de7531e/67.0/T033530A-ibactivity-activate3/content/graphic-organizer-template.template

Let me know if you have any questions or feedback.

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My district is K-5 iOS and 6-8 Chrome OS. Google Drive, Docs, Slides have come to dominate instruction. That said, Apple products still have superior accessibility features (in my opinion). Many students with special needs have writing deficits, and these templates are ready to use in instruction today. So, my hope is that by planting some seeds like the email above, staff will start using iWork with students more extensively moving forward (or at least with a subset of the student population).

Did you know each Apple Teacher skill in the Learning Center has its own URL? You can get it from the bottom of the page on each skill. This was really helpful for me to add to objectives on our curriculum documents. Teachers can click the link to see what learning that objective might look like when using Apple technology.

I have provided small bite-size Professional Learning resources -- videos, handouts, etc. I have tried to help them see the features of iPads that they might not be familiar with but also can have a large impact on their classroom instruction.