Selection of Past Constructivist Activities

Here are a selection of constructivist  activities that students have undertaken in previous years. These include guided reading activities, thinking activities and portfolio activities.

Functional Description of Visual Impairment

You will find it useful to follow up your reading of the terms introduced on the previous pages by accessing a summary of key terms produced by RNIB. This summary looks at what visual impairment means and its broad effects on learning and development.

You can select this link to view the Teaching and Learning guidance page on the RNIB website and then scroll down to find the document ‘Access to Education’:
http://www.rnib.org.uk/services-we-offer-advice-professionals-education-professionals/guidance-teaching-and-learning Links to an external site.

You may want to print out a copy of this document and draw on it for future reference in your role. It could be particularly useful for example to pass on to non-specialist practitioners as part of a training session on the impact of visual impairment on development and learning.

For the time being you should focus on Part 1 of the document entitled ‘Understanding vision impairment in children and young people’. This provides a useful overview of the different functional implications of visual impairment and the key questions that a teacher might ask about responding to these in the classroom.

While on the subject of terminology, you may notice that this document refers to ‘vision impairment’ rather than ‘visual impairment’.  This is a recent change in terminology promoted by Vision 2020 UK, an umbrella organisation of organisations concerned with blindness and partial sight,  to emphasise that the impairment lies in the vision and not the person affected.  You can find out more about the work of Vision 2020 UK at http://www.vision2020uk.org.uk/ Links to an external site. .

Essay on Definitions of Blindness

Read

For your next notebook study activity you should now access the National Foundation of the Blind website in order to read a brief essay on definitions of blindness by Kenneth Jernigan: A Definition of Blindness Links to an external site.

This essay provides a valuable reminder that whilst useful for certain purposes, medical and legal definitions of visual impairment may not always equate with more functional descriptions of visual impairment. The discussion provides a useful backdrop for a more in-depth analysis of visual assessment in the following sections of this unit.

Activity

Note down key points from reading the "Brief Essay on Definitions of Blindness" that have relevance to your studies of this module

Measuring Distance Vision

Introduction

As a specialist teacher, you will need to be familiar with a range of commonly used assessment tools for assessment of visual acuity.  The following Professional Activity Log will help you find out which are available in your School/Service for inspection.

As part of your studies for this module, you should plan to familiarise yourself with as many of these tests as possible (including seeing them being used in practice, reading through the instructions etc). A number of assessment tools will be discussed further at the Regional Study Day 1, and you may choose to select one of those listed above to include in your own presentation for the day (see the requirements for this day in the introduction to this Study Guide). We have explored the measurement of distance vision in some detail and now shift the focus to the assessment of near vision acuity.

Activity

For this activity you should refer to Chapter 6 of Mason and McCall. Provide a brief description (and full name if appropriate) of each of the tests listed in the table below which can be used to measure distance vision. You can either write a short description or use bullet points. You should then check with your Programme Mentor/Line Manager which of these tests are available in your school/service for inspection.

  1. Snellen
  2. STYCAR
  3. BUST
  4. KAY Picture Test
  5. SSAS
  6. LogMar
  7. Other?

 

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