Assistive technology in the classroom lesson

The drafting and engineering classes I teach use AutoCAD software to meet the requirements of the class. Students must be able to read and comprehend the thousands of different commands in AutoCAD to be successful. I try to have some type of modification for my ESL students to help them become better operators of the program. Students can communicate with the program by several different means such as typing in commands at the keyboard, using the mouse to pick on language menu, or a combination of these two methods. In a diverse classroom with ESL students not all students can read the ribbon or menu commands. I have gone inside the program and turned different options on that make the program more ESL friendly. One of the options is to allow more user friendly command ribbon with the commands showing up as a language command, a visual icon, or a combination of the two. In some cases when the student moves the curser over a graphic image/icon, such as something that looks like a five sided polygon, the word polygon will show up to the side. This is a great visual option for an ESL student. Another one of those options allows students to move their mouse pointer over a user icon and if the student leaves the curser over the icon for a second or more, the icon will pop open a small information box with simple visual clues to what that icon does or how to apply that command. I do a lot of modeling of the operation of the program on my teacher computer hooked to the projector. I show the students how these options work and how they can assist them in understanding how to navigate the program.