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Technology, Teaching and a Tipping Point:

How the mandate for accessible instructional materials
will change education for all students

Skip StahlBy Skip Stahl Project Director—NIMAS Development Center, Co-Director—AIM Consortium, Director—Technical Assistance, CAST

District personnel around the country are scratching their collective heads as they work to put procedures in place to address the IDEA 2004 mandate: that State and Local educational systems must provide specialized format materials - Braille, audio, digital text and/or large print – to any student receiving special education services who is also identified as being unable to use standard print materials. 
 
Moving beyond the statutory policy and implementation challenges, what does all this mean for the practice of education? It means a profound and fundamental shift in the status quo.

Curriculum Materials:

As the result of producing NIMAS digital source files, nearly all curriculum publishers have been “tipped” into the digital age, and many have significantly increased their production of digital curriculum content. This trend will increase significantly in the near future, making accessible and flexible learning materials commercially available for all students. As a consequence, the need for curriculum “accommodations” (usually a good indicator that the materials are demonstrably inappropriate to begin with) will significantly decrease.

Educators:

Administrators and teachers will need to increasingly incorporate networked and mobile (cell phones, PDAs, laptops, computers, etc.) technologies into their day-to-day educational practice because that is where the instructional content will be. Not to do so is not only absurd, it is fundamentally discriminatory since it presumes that only an elite subset of students will need to have access to the predominant tools of the culture. Increasingly, core instructional materials will be remotely delivered to these devices.  

Students:

Students will gravitate to flexible learning environments that offer the capability of customization and individualized learning opportunities. “Just in time” supports and scaffolds will empower all students towards achieving similar goals while simultaneously choosing a variety of access routes and means of expressing their respective achievement.  
 
The majority of these changes will be brought about by the confluence of consumer technologies, the rapid growth of digital communities, resources and connections, and by special education law mandating appropriate instructional practice for all students.