Educators implement effective planning, instruction, assessment, and reporting practices to create respectful, inclusive environments for student learning and development.
Today we were lucky to be visited by Victoria Woelders from ARC BC. This presentation gave me a lot of insight into what standard 5 can look like in the classroom and how I can implement it. Victoria highlighted through personal stories the importance of inclusion in education and how teachers can plan accordingly. ARC is a provincial outreach program where teachers and support staff travel around the province to work with individual students who need additional support. As a teacher it is important to be aware of different outreach programs that exist and that can be used to benefit a student. The ARC outreach program helps students on IEP’s and provides teachers with resources to plan and assess accessible lessons within the BC curriculum. This is powerful because it can provide novels, picture books, textbooks, etc. for students with perceptual disabilities.
The ARC program takes literature and transforms it into an accessible tool for students and classrooms. I was impressed by how easily accessible the resources are online, and how a teacher can access tools for a specific student with only an IEP number. Books are taken and turned into online formats with specific fonts/ font sizes, captions on images, navigation panes, and colour contrast. Victoria’s personal example of using ARC resources with her daughter is impactful because it shows the success that students can achieve just by reading their book in a different format. It is amazing how perfectly standard 5 is met with access to ARC resources because it allows teachers to plan and instruct inclusively.
Victoria also talked about AI as a helpful tool for teachers to assess, plan and instruct. Artificial Intelligence is still a very scary concept for me! The program Magic AI, however, stood out to me because it has many different tools to help teachers and students. As Victoria discussed, AI has benefits and down falls that must be taken into consideration. I am excited to try AI as a teacher, but there must be a delicate balance of how it is used in the classroom. Using AI for cheating, or paper writing can be detrimental to student success, but there are ways students can help themselves grow using AI, checking if their work meets the standards for example. After Victoria’s presentation today I look forward to practicing the use of AI as a teaching tool and having a wider variety of resources to access to promote inclusivity in the classroom.