Online Schools Naturally Accommodate

by Dora Raymaker · 2009-02-01 10:46:00 UTC
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a boy (back to the camera) sits facing a computer, on the screen is a window with a teacher in it and another window behind itA local Minnesota news site reports For some students, things are best learned online about how an online school is working well for an AS high school student. Online school is becoming more common; the article states, "Students taking classes entirely online almost doubled statewide from the 2006-2007 school year to 2007-2008, a jump from 2,544 students to 5,042 students."

I'm casually familiar with the concept of online schools for kids on the spectrum (and other kids too!) from my interactions with my local parent community. Oregon Connections Academy (ORCA) is the school of choice for quite a number of spectrumites in my part of the world. For many of those kids (believing the parent's reports anyway ;-), it's made a world of positive difference. And for many of the same reasons stated in the Minnesota article.

Of course I'm way too old to have had an opportunity like online schooling--computers didn't even show up in my school until I was nearly in high school, and those were used as part of math classes and little else. It was nearly 5 years after my high school graduation that the Internet was born. I can imagine though (incorporating some experiences I've had with online learning at the college level), and truly I would have thrived in such an environment (as opposed to my actual early schooling experiences which nearly resulted in institutionalization--"there but for the grace of God go I").

Particularly neat-o is that the very model of online school itself may eliminate many of the disabilities that can get in the way learning for some people on the spectrum: removing the sensory stress of the classroom environment, enabling communication and social interaction at a slower pace where it can actually be processed and understood, providing structure for organization to bypass "executive functioning" issues, putting control for learning more into the student's own hands--

Accommodations don't always need to be special and fancy. Sometimes the world itself can naturally accommodate. It's about finding the best possible match between a student and their learning environment.

Dora Raymaker
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