Saturday, December 29, 2007

Masters of Disaster


Last year, I learned that most of my students had no idea what to do in a disaster! Soon after that conversation, I read an email written by a parent of a kindergarten-aged son who uses both a wheelchair and a voice-output device. His class was studying fire safety, and she was worried that he would feel unsafe and left out as the class practiced "stop drop and roll", but gave him no opportunity to truly participate. What to do???? How do we get this information out? I decided that the easiest way to do it would be to adapt and modify or add activities to the Masters of Disaster curriculum.
And so, all last summer for several hours a week, I took up table space at my local chapter and worked on creating activities. Overall, we spent about 25-30 hours at the chapter creating activities, with another large amount at home researching. We created activities that could be done on paper, and also a number of activities for IntelliTools' Classroom Suite. Toward the end of the summer, I asked a group of parents who had children using Classroom Suite to examine the activities for me. These parents deserve a special thanks for taking time to look through the activities, and suggest changes or improvements. In addition, thanks go to a teacher at my school who was kind enough to look over the paper-based activities for me and the staff at my local chapter who gave me space to work. The activities are targeted at students with significant disabilities at the middle and high school level, or regular education & students with special needs in grades K-4.
Unfortunately, around this time, I had some computer issues that resulted in an upgrade to Vista. This has meant the project was shelved in fall as we decided how to approach this problem, as well as the release of Classroom Suite 4. It was decided to post the completed activities and then to go forward using Classroom Suite 4.
You can find the IntelliTools Activities in the Exchange by searching for Masters of Disaster. You can get more information about the Masters of Disaster curriculum at the Red Cross website.

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