💕 How to Teach a Blind or Visually Impaired Student || Special Education

How to Teach a Blind or Visually Impaired Student
As a teacher, your main priority is insuring that all of your students have an equal opportunity to access learning materials and succeed in your course. To teach visually impaired or blind students you should modify your teaching strategy, allow for the use of visual aids and assistive technology, and create a safe learning environment.
1. Explain any visuals. When you are teaching a visually impaired or blind student, it is important to clearly explain all visual materials. For example, if you are showing a picture to illustrate a point, you should describe the image. You could say something like “I have put a picture of Queen Elizabeth I on the board to illustrate the way she was depicted. She is wearing a large gown with a lot of detailed embroidery. This demonstrates her wealth and power.”
 You should also get in the habit of dictating what you are writing on the chalkboard or whiteboard. This way students who are unable to see the board can still follow along with the material and take notes.
2. Always give oral instructions. Do not provide your students with a handout that contains assignment instructions. Visually impaired or blind students in your class may have difficulty seeing the words and learning what is expected. Instead, you should always give oral instructions for every assignment and activity.
3. Ask students to clap to ask a question. Many classrooms rely on visual cues in order to ask questions or get the teacher’s attention. It is very traditional for students to raise their hand if they want to speak during a lesson. Visually impaired or blind students may not notice when their peers raise their hands. Instead, you should replace visual cues with audio cues.

 For example, you could have students clap twice if they want to ask a question.
4. Provide tactile learning experiences. When you are teaching a class with visually impaired or blind students, you should try and incorporate tactile learning experiences whenever possible. For example, instead of talking about rocks and showing images of different types of rocks, you should actually have physical rocks available in the classroom for the students to touch and handle.
 This can also be done with different foods, shells, properties of matter, etc.
 This will allow your students to explore and learn without relying solely on sight.
5. Address all students by name. Students who are visually impaired or blind may not always know who is talking. As a result you should always address students by their name when you call on them to answer or ask questions. This way the student who is visually impaired can learn to identify their peers based on the sound of their voice.
6. Give visually impaired or blind students additional time to complete work. In some instances visually impaired or blind students may need extra time to complete their assignments and tests. This is typically because reading braille or using some form of technological aide can take additional time.
 Although you want to give an appropriate amount of time for visually impaired or blind students to complete their work, you do not want them use their vision as an excuse to hand in work late. Set deadlines and make sure they stick to them.
7. Treat all of your students equally. Even though you will need to make certain modifications to your teaching style and classroom structure in order to accommodate students with visual impairments, you should still hold these students to the same standard as the rest of their peers. For example, all classroom rules and behavioural expectations should apply to all of the students in the class. Avoid giving special treatment to visually impaired students.
8. Consider the curriculum. When you are teaching visually impaired or blind students, you may need to modify the curriculum and the way you teach the curriculum in order the meet the student’s needs. For example, when teaching art, you will want to rely more on tactile experiences. Try sculpting and working with clay, instead of drawing or coloring.

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