It's been fun getting updates on the Iditarod. Several things impress me about the mushers who run the race; among these is their perseverance. This discussion on whether perseverance can be taught is interesting to me as an educator. It's perhaps more relevant to K-12 education, and we all have students whom we wish would just continue to work instead of giving up. How do we encourage perseverance, persistence, grit in our students? What can we build into our assignments and learning activities to encourage persistence? Let me know your thoughts.
The Department of Justice released revised final regulations on effective communication for persons with disabilities. These regulations affect how we communicate with students and all the learning materials and learning activities we provide to them. Some proactive practices can help ease the workload if you have a student needing these accommodations. The easiest is to start creating Word and PDF files that can be read and navigated by a screen reader. In Word, this means using Styles, tables, and the column tool rather than just creating these by hand. It takes some getting used to but actually makes changing and editing a document much easier. Here's a cheat sheet for Word 2010.
If you want an example of what can happen if you don't provide timely alternative effective communication for students who experience disabilities, read this settlement between the U.S. Government and Louisiana Tech University.
