Ideas for using Study Island for Special Ed students

One key for Special Education & NCLB / IDEA is that students must be assessed against grade level standards-- this particularly applies to Learning Disabled or Behavior Disabled students. Study Island is a grade way for special educators to make sure that IEP students are linked to the general education curriculum and standards.

The “Individual Student Summary” report is terrific for individualizing (differentiating) instruction for Spec Ed students; also great to include in IEPs.

Teachers can pull up the results of an assignment and drill down to “view missed” so she can work individually with a student to analyze the student’s thinking in answering the missed questions. This allows the opportunity for the teacher to re-teach the topic/standard by using a different example or explanation.

The building block questions allow students to work at lower levels, and still be compared to grade level standards. Great data source for IEP meetings too.

The default passing percentage can be lowered, to allow special needs students the ability to compete for a blue ribbon with the rest of the students. This can be accomplished so that no one can notice this accommodation.

The grade level at which the student is working can be lowered if deemed necessary. This can be accomplished so that no one can notice this accommodation.

Teachers can create “Printable Worksheets” of standards-based questions, save them as Microsoft Word documents and, edit the questions as they see fit including by limiting the number of distractors from the multiple choice answers.

Special Ed teachers have a lot of documenting! They also have to track the minutes they service each child. That is easily done with SI. They can print out and/or view the reports to log their minutes.

The IEP (Individualized Education Plan) is very detailed and child specific. Our reports can track progress of each child for each state standard.

The “Compare With Others” report is terrific to show during Parent-Teacher conferences and/or IEP conferences and for including in IEPs. This report provides a graphic that show how this student compares standard-by-standard with all other students at that school in that grade AND with all other students in that state in that grade level.

Many third party software downloads (listed on the Admin Page) work smoothly with Study Island to allow students to highlight text passages and to hear the text read aloud to them.