Teachers' DEN (Deaf Education Network)

Deaf Education “Life Hacks”

As 2018 winds down and goals for a more productive 2019 are being made, the Deaf Education team would like to offer some “life hacks” that may helpful to become more organized in the new year.

Service documentation—Best practice denotes that services should be documented and readily available to present at a moment’s notice. Teachers and therapists should get in the habit of documenting the amount of service each student should be receiving per his/her IEP, the dates of service provision, notes of what occurred during the session and a plan to make up for missed sessions. This ensures that the Individualized Education Plan (IEP) is being followed. A good service documentation tool is available on the internet that can be easily modified to meet specific school’s or teacher’s needs. 

Scheduling—Juggling multiple calendars for both personal and business can be challenging. You Can Book Me is a great online application that displays your availability to potential meeting participants. This reduces the amount of time spent going back and forth to check participants’ individual calendars. Bookings are automatically synced with your calendar to eliminate the extra step of creating a calendar entry.

Digital curation—There can be a lot of papers, folders, binders and notebooks floating around that do not have an apparent organizational system. Such loose items can be cumbersome to lug around, but it can also be time consuming 

to try to go back and locate needed information. There are numerous digital curation sites available online. These can also serve as an organized collection of information that can be shared with families and school staff. Some favorite digital curation sites are: Diigo, Google Drive, LiveBinders, Pinterest and Pocket.

Rocketbook—If you still want to take notes on paper, Rocketbook is a great way to take your handwritten notes and file them away digitally. Rocketbook is dubbed a smart notebook that uses special paper with a QR code on each page. Once the Rocketbook app is downloaded on your mobile device, you scan a page and it is automatically emailed, saved or shared to your pre-specified locations. As a bonus, the special pens are erasable on Rocketbook or regular paper. Once the Rocketbook is full, simply wipe the pages down with a damp cloth or place in the microwave for a few seconds and the smart notebook is ready to use again.

Sticky notes—Are you someone who writes down everything on a sticky note? Not only is paper waste bad for the environment, but it does not have the ability to integrate with anything other than the object it is stuck to. Google Keep is the next generation of sticky notes that easily integrates with many
other G Suite applications. You can create a shopping list, draw, savewebsites and take notes. You can easily set a reminder for something you have in Google Keep, for example, a student could take a picture of the board in class that has homework assignments listed, open in Google Keep, set a hashtag to organize all homework assignments and notes from the same class and then set a reminder for due dates. The possibilities of Google Keep are endless!

Troubleshooting kit—As teachers for the deaf and hard of hearing travel from place to place, it is helpful to have some items readily available to quickly troubleshoot students’ hearing assistive technology. The most beneficial items are extra batteries, a battery checker, stethoset and an FM/DM receiver checker. For additional items to include, watch our November 2018 Effecting Positive Outcomes (EPO) webinar titled Hearing Assistive Technology (HAT) in the Classroom. Find out why you should have an eraser in your toolkit!

For a list of links above, visit https://tinyurl.com/y9j7aplx.