News You Can Use

D.E.A.R. (Drop Everything and Read), is a national month-long celebration designed to remind individuals of all ages to make reading a priority and to honor the Newberry Award winning author, Beverly Cleary. Mrs. Cleary wrote about D.E.A.R. in her book, Ramona Quimby, Age 8 which was published in 1981. D.E.A.R.'s sponsors are telling everyone to "drop" whatever they are doing, including chores or errands, and pick up a good book to celebrate our beloved author, her timeless stories, and the joy of reading during the month of April. Make sure your students have a good selection of D.E.A.R books to read on their digital devices so they can contribute to classroom conversations as well as practice their reading accommodations.

HOORAY! Spring is on the way. Whether families are headed to the beach, camping, amusement parks or even a staycation, it’s a great time to practice using those reading accommodation tools with real-life reading opportunities. Using reading tools such as text-to-speech during fun, low stress, literacy activities help to build independence and encourage practice with the tool-based skills needed for more academic reading when returning to school.

Welcome to supporting an awareness of literacy for students who use Braille. Braille literacy is directly linked to print literacy, academic success, and future employment. It unlocks many doors both personally for enjoyment and independence as well as professionally, leading to greater satisfaction and fulfillment toward a life well-lived!

Join teachers and students from around the world to celebrate Digital Learning Day (DLDay.) Digital Learning Day was created in 2012 by the Alliance for Excellent Education to spread innovative digital learning opportunities. During this world-wide celebration, teachers and students share ideas about using digital tools in the classroom.

January is a great time to order those seasonal books and curriculum-based materials! This fun time of year brings many winter topics and vocabulary to explore in classrooms. As classes are working on winter theme units, are your students with print disabilities able to access these thematic books and other materials to read this season? No? AIM-VA can help by converting teacher-created winter curriculum-based materials such as a Frosty Worksheets or Winter Weather Watch Charts and convert them to formats such as large print, accessible PDFs, structured WORD documents and ePubs.

During recent webinars, we selected the following three questions asked by attendees that we felt would benefit everyone.

Text-to-speech provides bimodal presentation of both visual and aural text. Seeing and hearing the text at the same time allows students to focus on comprehension instead of sounding out words, as well as improving word recognition.