Digital Literacy in Special Education: Preparing Students for College and the Workplace

Digital literacy is essential for individuals entering college and the workplace. Students with disabilities experience a greater challenge in acquiring the skills necessary to succeed. This chapter explores the disability digital divide, success factors for acquiring digital skills, and the implications of a digital literacy curriculum developed for special education classrooms in Idaho. It demonstrates how leveraging human performance improvement (HPI) models, incorporating universal design for learning (UDL) principles, and supporting classroom teachers resulted in a curriculum to help young people with disabilities to acquire the digital skills they need to be prepared for college and the workplace

Storyvisualizer by Lego Education: Using Digital Storytelling to Integrate Stem and Literacy

The purpose of this chapter is to provide teachers with an example of how the modern students\u27 life (Legos and graphic novels) can be used creatively to engage children in digital storytelling around STEM topics. Specifically, the authors explore the use of graphic novels, or longer visual narratives, to serve as mentor texts for students in creating shorter comics-based digital stories. They begin with a section on integration of STEM and literacy, followed by a description of how digital literacies and digital storytelling can be used in service of such integration, with particular attention on the visual medium of graphic novels as a medium for connecting these practices in the classroom. Finally, they demonstrate how Lego Story Visualizer can be employed to meet our goals of integration and digital storytelling and to connect academic learning to children\u27s world and daily cultural practices