Final post in a series on Internet resources for Educators working with Special Needs students.

This week’s post is a bit of a mixed bag. I’ll wrap up this 5 part series ^[1] with some information on resources for students with physical handicaps (other than visual impairments ^[2], and hearing impairments ^[3], covered the last two weeks). I will also cite a few more general resources for working with special needs students, as the focus on specific categories of needs in these recent posts could not (by its very definition) include all types of disabilities. I have come across a number of informative links pages that can be useful to educators and administrators working with the wide variety of physical, mental, and emotional disabilities that students can face, and wanted to share them here.

Resources for educators working with physically handicapped students
A range of resources, including accommodations, techniques, and more, for helping students with physical handicaps.

• I’ll start with this informative overview of assistive technologies for the physically handicapped ^[4] from Wikipedia.
• Next, these techniques & insights ^[5] from specialed.about.com.
• Followed by these accommodations and interventions ^[6], also from the specialed.about.com pages.
• This page ^[7] provides links to a wide variety of Assistive Technologies, including adaptive keyboards and a hands-free mouse from NaturalPoint (along with other technologies for other physical disabilities).
• This site ^[8] features ”Special Education Keyboarding Programs that work” (and includes tools specific to a variety of physical handicaps, and more).

Other resources for working with the special needs students
Special needs come in many forms and I have not been able to address them all in this series of posts. With that in mind, following are a few resources to lead you to further information in dealing with the different challenges you may be come across in your work with special needs students.

• This site, Special Education Resources on the Internet ^[9], is devoted to this topic, and provides hundreds of links, grouped into 23 different categories.
• Internet Special Education Resources ^[10]: Another site wholly devoted to the topic.
• The Special Education Resources Page ^[11] from “The Teacher’s Guide” website.
• This Educator Resources page ^[12] from the U.S. Government’s “Disability.gov” web site contains many useful links (the initial page starts with 5 groupings, such as Instructional Strategies, Student Supports & Accommodations, etc.).
• This ‘practical guide’ to teaching students with disabilities ^[13], from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a great example of the guidance educational institutions can provide for the educational community. Many educational institutions hosts similar pages, and are pretty easy to find with a quick search.
• Last, this page from the Edutopia site ^[14] discusses assistive technology success stories, and there are a handful of similar pages linked here (on the right hand side of the page). While this is not the same kind of encompassing resource as the others provided here, it is an interesting and relevant site and I thought worthy of inclusion here.

Conclusions
As I have mentioned throughout this series of posts, there are countless resources on the web that provide information and tools that can be helpful in working with special needs students. I hope I have managed to bring together some quality resources that are targeted primarily towards educators and the educational process, and will save some time for those searching for this type of information. As always, I remind readers that I welcome their insights, comments, and suggestions - others are very likely to find your input and feedback useful, so please comment if you have something you would like to share (and thanks for doing so).

Next?
Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what I am going to cover next week. I have a long list of potential topics set aside, but I also welcome reader input, so feel free to shoot me a request to consider (and please be sure to come back and see what kind of Internet based technology for education we’re going to learn about next)!

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