Improving Education For Special Needs Students – Part Three

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Today’s question: Where can technology be used and implemented to improve education for special needs student?

1. Dr. Golson explains the importance of data, and keeping better records of how children are performing.

2. Children each learn at a different pace, and with technology, and they can sit and practice at an appropriate pace. And be a great supplemental teaching tool for the teacher.

3. Tools such as smart boards can also be great platforms to teach interaction and group thinking.

4. SIVAD assists by setting a system that collects data on how children are performing, supports managing the classroom, managing their data, tools that support all the requirements around serving special needs education students. SIVAD also teaches and trains the teachers on how best to implement and utilize the software to get the most possible impact.

Here is Part 1 in the series… Part 2…

[The series is hosted by Red Crayon President Dr. Nancy Golson and SIVAD President Ron Davis. Email Ron Davis with any questions, or to learn more.]

###

If you enjoyed this broadcast, please subscribe on iTunes here. A positive customer rating would be much appreciated as well.

Improving Education For Special Needs Students – Part Two

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Today’s question: Response to intervention (RTI)… What is it? And how does it work?

As Dr. Golson and Ron Davis explain, response to intervention (RTI) is a process by which a teacher has to report progress on a special needs student learning specific skills, and whether or not they are learning the skill in a timely manner. It is a comprehensive reporting process.

But the big question is, how does a teacher handle their responsibilities with RTI…and also take care of a full class of students? It can become a burden and is time consuming…

Ron discusses a solution to help teachers better manage this…

Here is Part 1 in the series…

[The series is hosted by Red Crayon President Dr. Nancy Golson and SIVAD President Ron Davis. Email Ron Davis with any questions, or to learn more.]

Improving Education for Special Needs Students – Part One

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Part One of a series of conversation around how to improve education for special needs students.

Today’s question: What are some of the challenges that face school administrators when trying to offer the best possible education to special needs students?

The critical challenges are, of course, funding, resources and bureaucratic paperwork. How can technology assist both teachers and administrators?

The series is hosted by Red Crayon President Dr. Nancy Golson and SIVAD President Ron Davis.

Nancy Golson on SIVAD Radio!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

A real pleasure to be joined by Nancy Golson on today’s show. Nancy has been in education for over 40 years, serving as teacher, principal and Director of Special Education and now as education concultant with Red Crayon Associates.

Dr. Golson has worked in Charlote Mecklenburg School System in Charlottte North Carolina and Auburn City Schools in Auburn, Alabama. She has worked as a consultant for many schools systems in special education, school improvement, and accreditation.

On today’s show, we discussed the following topics:

1. The challenges faced by school administrators when trying to offer the best possible education to special needs students.

2. The impacts federal programs, such as No Child Left Behind, have on the impact of special needs students.

3. The process of evaluating students for special education via Response to Intervention, how it works, and the strain all this has on serving special needs students.

4. The increased role technology will play in helping and serving special needs students, including that of interactive technologies such as smart boards, projectors, etc.

SIVAD Business Solutions Partners With Excent

SIVAD Business Solutions Partners With Excent

The two companies will join forces to bring hope and more opportunity for our children’s futures!

Ron Davis, President of SIVAD Business Solutions, announced today a partnership with Excent, Corporation. Excent, a maker of software for public school districts that empowers children, and SIVAD, a company that markets and implements software solutions, will partner to market Excent’s solutions to a much broader audience over the southeastern United States.

”We are honored to be aligned with Excent,” said SIVAD President Ron Davis, “their quality software solutions are best-in-class in the educational market. Sivad is thrilled to help our customers do amazing and innovative things with Excent’s solutions.”

SIVAD serves three primary market sectors: education, government, and small to medium sized businesses. They help organizations improve internal business processes, remove bottlenecks to improve efficiency and help organizations of all sizes manage their information more effectively.

The education market has long been a prime and important market for SIVAD, and combining our strengths with Excent will allow us to serve our clients with greater innovation and deeper resources.

“Our solutions have a dramatic impact on the lives of children,” said David Craig, president of Excent, “and to have a partner like SIVAD bring this to a broader and larger market is very exciting for us.”

SIVAD and Excent have already implemented solutions in both Georgia and Alabama, and are now looking to expand into several more states.

Excent® is dedicated to the development of innovative software solutions and dynamic youth programs that provide teachers and administrators with the tools, resources, and information they need to more effectively teach and empower all children.

SIVAD is a technology solutions company dedicated to help automate the broken work processes that plague organizations and affect their bottom line.

###

Automating “Response to Intervention” for Education

This has been a very rewarding week. After 2 years of crafting a technology solution to help a specific area of K12 Public Education, a school district took the first steps in making my vision a reality.

This all started when I was sitting down speaking to one of my neighbors. She is involved in helping carry out the Special Education process in a school district. She mentioned that there was a new program to evaluate a child who might be in need of Special Education services; this new program is called “Response to Intervention” (RTI). This program had replaced the previous one in hopes that a child would be better assessed and a specific instructional program could be designed for them.

The issue with this new program is that it is information intensive. Like the name says, there are “interventions” with the child to evaluate what skills they have and what skills they need. This happens on a weekly basis and could be with the general class, in small groups, or as individuals, depending on what “tier” of intervention they are at. As you can imagine, this requires a lot of dedicated time from the teacher, which reduces the time spent with their 20+ other students. There are forms to be filled out, data to be collected, testing to be done, progress monitoring to be completed and much more. Plus, they need to know when to get other support personnel involved and provide them with the right information.

My nature is to be a problem solver, so I dove into RTI to see what I could come up with. I saw a number of software programs available to address the different parts of RTI, mainly screening and progress monitoring programs, but no real programs to address the whole process. I decided my priority would be solving the problem of teachers spending too much time filing out paperwork. I also wanted to offer a solution that worked with the current software they already knew and was installed in the district.

My solution was to create an end-to-end automation of the RTI process and make everything electronically based. There would be no more gathering of information on paper, where it would then have to be manually entered in another system. We took all of their paper forms and made them intelligent electronic forms that communicated with their current installed software. The electronic forms will guide the teachers through the process of filling them out. Once filled out, they are electronically sent to all who need to work on them or approve them. The data from the forms can also automatically populate progress monitoring applications, Student Information Systems, data analysis graphs, and other internal applications.

My goal is to dramatically reduce the time teachers spend filing out forms, so they can do more important things, such as being in front of students. My other goal, is that the accuracy of the whole process is increased, leading to a better designed educational program for the student in need.

I will undoubtedly blog more about this as the solution gets rolled out. There is much work to do, but the cause and goal are worth it.

I welcome any comments you might have.