BY JOYCE WILSON
Students with ADHD and other learning disabilities need their own study strategies, activities, and resources to ensure their educational success. One way to provide this is to take advantage of Open Educational Resources (OER) — large collections of educational materials that students and teachers can browse through, at little or no cost, to find activities that work for them.
OERs encompass a wide range of resources, primarily electronic but also print, that can be used for teaching, learning, or research. The scope of OERs includes:
Sites such as Edutopia, iTunes U, and OER Commons serve as online guides and repositories for locating these types of resources.
Here are some of the ways OERs can assist students with ADHD or other learning disabilities.
One strategy recommended by Helpguide.org for teaching students diagnosed with ADHD is emphasizing visuals and visual aids, such as charts, pictures, color-coding, and props.
An example of a popular OER resource that can be applied to ADHD education is Picto-Selector, a free online tool for creating visual resources used by many parents and teachers. Picto-Selector lets users search an image library of 28,000 illustrations that can be automatically sized in rows and columns and reused as templates.
Other online collections of useful OER visual aids can be located using sites such as Autism Speaks and Pinterest.
Another recommended strategy for teaching students who have ADHD is using educational games to engage a child’s attention. Two helpful OERs in this area include:
Shorter teaching and testing materials are good fits for kids with ADHD, who lose interest in longer, more complicated presentations. For example: