Working with children who have Autism

I am very interested in teaching special education, more specifically students who have autism spectrum disorder. This summer I worked at a summer camp with a child who had autism and it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. Working with Alex got me interested in working with students who have autism. In this blog post I want to discuss ways to help children with autism be integrated in the classroom. As teachers we have to know how to teach children with autism and learn strategies that will make them an integrated and important part of the classroom. The first strategy is to be consistent. Students with autism have a hard time adapting to new things. If they know and learn a schedule or procedure the day will run smoother because they are not guessing about what is coming next. If there is going to be a change in the schedule or activity the teacher or aid will need to notify the child so they can prepare for this. This change may cause the child anxiety, but this will only happen every so often. It is beneficial to have a schedule and protocol for activities so the child does not have to keep guessing about how things are going to be run throughout the day. The next technique to help students with autism in the classroom is to reward good behavior. Since students with autism have difficulties functioning in certain social situations it may benefit the classroom and student if the teacher sets up a reward system for good behavior. An example of this would be if the student had a chart and whenever they behaved in an appropriate manner they got to put a star on their chart. Each time they received 10 stars they get a reward. The key to this system is to know your student. The reward would need to be pre-chosen so the child knows what reward they are working for. If they really like the reward they are more likely to behave. This strategy worked really well when I worked with Alex this summer. Every time he behaved when we were walking to a new activity or during transitions he would get to put a rock in a plastic baggy. Every time he got 10 rocks he would get a reward. The last strategy I want to discuss is to have a ‘safe’ place for the child to go. When a child with autism becomes frustrated or upset they may begin to throw a tantrum. It is beneficial for the teacher to talk to the aid and the child and discuss a place for the child to go when they begin to feel like they are going to have a tantrum. This could be the hallway, office, gym, etc. If they child can recognize or at least be removed from the classroom to cool down then they don’t become a distraction. This strategy also teaches the child to identify when they are going to have a tantrum and then to remove themselves. These strategies helped me when I was working with Alex at camp and will help teachers with autistic students in the classroom.

Comic Strip Making Technology

I have explored the website www.pixton.com, which is a website for students to create comic strips. While exploring the website I created a comic and learned how to use the technology. Creating my comic was not hard after I explored and played around on the website. There were three difficult aspects of this technology that took me a little longer to figure out than the rest of the technology. These two most difficult aspects were thinking of a story and positioning the characters. My suggestion to teachers and students who want to make a comic are to brainstorm what you want to say in your comic. The next step is to map out what you want to say in each panel, and then figure out how to put it in as few words as possible so it will fit in the panel. It is important to remember to be very precise so the comic is not too crowded. The speech bubbles are only so big and at first I struggled to fit all the words in them. Once I figured out that I need to keep it short and to the point the words fit in the speech bubbles and my comic flowed much better. The second aspect that I struggled with while making my comic was the fact that the characters are pre-set to face a certain way. For example, if I wanted the character on the left side of the panel, but they were preset facing right then the person would be talking to the side of the panel instead of the other character. This was very frustrating, but after playing on the website for a little while I figured out that on pixton.com you could rotate certain parts of the body so they were facing the way that you wanted them to. In order to do this you need to double click on the body part and rotate it the way you want it to face. The only downfall to this is that you can’t rotate the whole character; you have to rotate each body part individually. The last aspect that I struggled with was being able to get all of the information spaced correctly on the panel. Playing around with the characters and speech bubbles easily solved this problem and I figured out how to space these things correctly. The struggles that I experienced were masked by the benefits I saw in the comic book making technology. Some features of the comic strip making technology that I enjoyed were that there were about thirty pre-set backgrounds and if you couldn’t find anything that you liked you could download images from the Internet. This is beneficial because the students can show that they understand a concept or a book based mainly on pictures. Even if they struggle with writing they can show they understand because this technology is not solely based on text. Another thing that I liked was that there were many different panel sizes to choose from. You could create comics as small as one panel or as large as twelve panels. I like this technology
I really liked this technology because it is useful to many different types of students. Comic strip making technology is beneficial for students who struggle in reading and writing. In this technology students can show comprehension or the understanding of a topic by the sequence of pictures and the text would be secondary. Since comics have few words the students would have to pull the important meaning out of the text and use as few words as possible to convey the meaning. Overall I think pixton.com will be very beneficial to my classroom and I will definitely have my students create comics to see if they comprehend books or understand a certain subject.