Guide – examples of four learning situations

Lisa is 26 years old and have difficulty concentrating and have trouble with their attention in school. Lisa also has difficulty sitting still and working with the school for a long time. Lisa has symptoms that are often found in people with ADHD.

Suggested learning process
Create and use a classroom-blog for ex. Google Sites, WordPress, or equivalent where students can take part in any media, regardless of time and place. The blog is part of the digital learning platform, a place on the web that is only accessible to the class or individual students. A shared calendar helps Lisa and her teachers to jointly plan and follow-up time of the various deadlines. When using flipped classroom, then Lisa take advantage of all lesson materials when and where it suits her best. She can also take advantage of short films with the teacher’s instructions and tasks. Making use of a program for speech synthesis means that the written text to be spoken by the computer voice. The teacher can also read their own texts as audio files, for example, mobile app Voice Record Pro and embed it with an audio player on the blog in connection with the written text.

Many times Lisa feel that it is easier to absorb information by listening instead of reading. When Lisa can do this alone, it might help her to concentrate and focus on the specific task. That could mean fewer distractions for the student, and make it easier to work with the task over a longer period of time. But it can also mean more distractions, if you’re doing many things at once. Try to create an environment in school where students can work undisturbed, for example sit in a quiet room or in a limited area of the classroom. You often need to limit external stimuli / impression to promote concentration. Listening in headphones can be very helpful when it comes to students with difficulties to concentrate.

A good idea is to find out what Lisa is interested in, and create learning tasks based on her intersests. Motivation, which in many cases can be difficult to find when it comes to ADHD, can more easily be found if the student can start from their own world of experience and their own interests. If the nature and content of the task is tied to the individual’s previous experience and interests, the students will be more engaged in the work. A person with ADHD are often very creative, and think ”outside the box”. It is important to try to support the creativity of students, and thereby provide space for new ideas and approaches to solve the problems. Ask students to be co-creators of the course content, structure and tasks.

Working with blended learning allows students to receive support and guidance from the teacher in the classroom, and students can also interact with the teacher at home or at another location. With blended learning, you can choose the type of teacher interaction that works best. Teachers feedback is given continuously in relation to the task targets, linked to the work of a formative assessment. Continuous feedback and a clear feedback of the progress, increases motivation and interest of

Keyword/Subject:

• concentration
• endurance
• uninterrupted working environment
• speech synthesis
• classroom-blog
• shared documents
• calendar
• text as audio files
• read several times if you want to

Example 2

About the student
Eric is 42 years old and has difficulty communicating verbally with others. He also finds it difficult to interact/collaborate with others and to work in groups. These challenges are symptoms similar to Asperger’s, a part of the autism spectrum.

Suggested learning process
With the use of blended learning and flipped classroom, students can choose how to communicate with the teacher and with other students. If you create a digital classroom in the form of a classroom-blog, students can work at home or in an undisturbed environment, in their private sphere. When you work in, for example, Google Sites or WordPress the student can communicate with the teacher and other students, in the form of their own posts or comments of other people’s posts. The blog can also help students with pictures, videos or links, as well as creating working groups with different tasks within the digital classroom. Students can more easily collaborate with others and work in various working groups. Padlet is an interactive bulletin board for group work that might be useful. A Padlet can thus facilitate for Erik to interact and collaborate with others.

Many students with Asperger’s often have special interests, which means that they have a strong focus on this particular area. This special interest you should try to take advantage of, using interest focused materials in teaching. For these students, oral instructions (and verbal feedback) may be difficult to absorb, they often find it easier to absorb written (and clear) instructions and written feedback. In some cases you can also supplement the written instructions with pictures or symbols depicting the different tasks, which can be the difference between success and failure.

Routines are often very important, and requires that the teacher needs to prepare the lesson content so that students know in advance what to expect. In a classroom-blog you can provide information about what the next tasks are, so that students can prepare themselves mentally for the task.

Using the example program such as Voice Note II (extensions in the Chrome browser) or the recording function in Google Document allows Erik to speak what he wants to communicate. What he says is converted into text that can be sent to the teacher and other students. With the VoiceThread (paid), students can create their presentation with one or more images and / or movies. You can allow others to access and participate in the presentation by commenting on the text, sound or film, to reinforce what you want to obtain.

Sökord/ämnesord

• communication
• collaboration
• communication/clear instructions
• calendar
• classroom-blog
• note board
• speech synthesis
• audio recording

Example 3