Teaching students with disabilities online featuring Geneva Rodriguez

Hello EduMagicians,

Welcome back to another episode of the edumagic podcast! Today I have a fantastic guest on the show, Geneva Rodriguez. She is a special education teacher in NYC, where she teaches students with severe disabilities in the online space. During this episode, she shares her teaching stories and several strategies to teach and reach students with special needs in the online space.

Geneva has been teaching in the online space for about a year with her students. This episode is jam-packed with tips and strategies you can immediately incorporate into your online class. Here we go:

• Build relationships with students, staff, and classroom professionals

• Have routines and structures available - this helps with your classroom management!

• Check in with students on their social and emotional well being

• How are you doing?

• create a safe place for students

• share something that you did this weekend

• provide a sentence starter that models to students how to ask and answer questions

• Provide movement

• Give brain breaks through dance

• Provide opportunities for self-advocacy

• Yoga and stretching

• Visuals are used to make concrete connections

• Communication devises to share and voice their opinions, wants, needs, skills, and more.

• Art therapy helps with following instructions and fine motor skills, communication, and creativity!

• Task analysis breaks down a task into small steps, for example, modeling how to make a safe and healthy meal or do a task, chore, etc.

• Digital classroom newsletter and youtube channel to model tasks and skills for students and parents.

• Parents are partners in the classroom, whether online or face to face.

• Work with the other professional in your class - paras, classroom assistants, parents, and other support professionals.

• Description of how Geneva uses Class Dojo in her class! So many great ideas were shared on how to use the dojo in the high school particular ed class!

Resources mentioned in this episode

• Every child needs a champion

• https://www.classdojo.com/

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