PEATC is committed to developing opportunities to help children with disabilities, and indeed, all children, learn how to read and improve their literacy skills so that they can achieve success in life.

PEATC is also developing ways to enable parents and professionals to teach reading skills that incorporate strategies and 'how-to' information. In the area of assessment, we are looking to offer critically needed information. PEATC continues to seek business and technology partners interested in expanding opportunities for literacy training using state-of-the-art technology and research-based training strategies.

LiteracyAccess Online is an innovative Internet-based, hands-on, interactive instructional tool designed to teach parents, teachers, volunteers, teaching assistants and others literacy skills necessary to teach children having reading difficulties in 3rd through 8th grade. This innovative program guides parents, teachers, volunteers and paraprofessionals through creative strategies, training and student-involved exercises necessary to reach and teach students who need and want to learn to read, but who have often experienced frustration and failure at trailing behind their peers. Areas of literacy skills training currently include: language arts, science, social studies, math and the general curriculum, which, in reality, comprises every part of life in and out of school. Development LiteracyAccess Online has been accomplished through the successful partnership between PEATC and George Mason University's Kellar Institute for Human disabilities. Graduate level students in Instructional Design, as well as, parents and teachers contributed to the design through onsite participation and online pilots.

Because of great advances in literacy and brain research there are many new wonderful ways to teach literacy skills to children. While these ways are affective for many children, a literacy program for children with disabilities is much harder to find.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) are leading to higher expectations and greater accountability for schools and students with disabilities. Literacy skills are imperative to achieve total access to the general curriculum for special education students and therefore must be given to all students. There are many efforts to increase literacy but there is still a great need for enhanced and intensive literacy efforts on behalf of students with disabilities.

Computer-based and web-based instruction is more commonplace today and it is making good curriculum and learning tools more accessible. Assistive technology has increased the accessibility to these new curriculums and learning tools for everyone. By using these tools to gain literacy skills, individuals with disabilities can have a greater quality of life.

In response to the need for literacy instruction for children with disabilities, the Helen A. Kellar Institute for Human disAbilities at George Mason University and the Parent Educational Advocacy Training Center (PEATC) developed LiteracyAccess Online through a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education programs "Stepping Stones of Technology Innovation for Students with Disabilities Program" CFDA 84.327A.

Literacy Access Online is a universally accessible, web-based literacy learning tool for students in 9 through 14 with disabilities.

Literacy Access Online features:

1. Utilize best practices in basic literacy instruction.
2. Incorporate existing and emerging assistive, web-based, and instructional technologies.
3. Include direct instruction to enhance learner/facilitator interactions.
4. Integrate current, age appropriate, real life literacy experiences into student centered learning activities.
5. Apply the principles of universal design to provide access to all students with disabilities.

Literacy Access Online is available at no charge to anyone with an Internet connection.

You can see and try out the LAO tool at www.literacyaccessonline.com.