The website of the B.C. Ministry of Education has a section devoted to special needs education. It includes a brochure which provides parents with an overview of the IEP process.
The B.C. Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils has developed a resource to help guide parents through IEP meetings. See the BCCPAC website to download the guide.
Wrightslaw has a good introduction to SMART IEPs (although some of the references deal with American law and practices).
The province of Alberta's Ministry of Education has a good introductory manual for educators who teach learners with Autism Spectrum Disorder. It is more recent than the British Columbia Ministry of Education manual, and includes some material not found in the B.C. publication, such as a chapter on collaborating with parents.
The Organization for Autism Research has a number of free guides available for download, including this guide for educators, which contains suggestions for organizing the classroom, preparing peers, and what questions educators might want to ask parents about their child.
The Provincial Outreach Program for Autism and Related Disorders is an excellent resource for educators (and parents!).
Did you know? Parents whose children are having great difficulty participating in Physical Education class can consider taking a distributed education PE, while continuing to attend their regular school for other courses. South Island Distance Education is one of the schools that offer PE in a distribued education format.
Autism Community Training has been working on a manual to provide a comprehensive resource to parents of children with ASD and the professionals who support them. Several chapters are now available on the ACT website, including chapters on the B.C. educational system and the role of parental advocacy in navigating it, and on financial planning for families of children with disabilities. Other chapters will become available in the months to come. And there's a list of acronyms, from AAC to YCW, for the initially confused (which is probably most of us...)
The Mosaic Learning Society is the brainchild of a group of parents in the Victoria area who recognized the need for educational, recreational and social programs for children with ASD. As of October 2010 the Society is housed in a learning centre at 1168 Lugrin Place in Esquimalt.
The Let’s Face It! Team at UVic has free downloads designed to help children with autism:
"Let's Face It! is a joint project between the University of Victoria Brain and Cognition Lab and the Yale Child Study Centre. The program is a multimedia, computer-based intervention that is designed to teach face processing skills to children with autism. Research has shown that in addition to their difficulties with language and social communication, children with autism may experience difficulties in their ability to recognize facial identity and emotions. The Let's Face It! program guides the child through a series of engaging, interactive game modules designed to teach basic face processing skills. Each module targets some aspect of face processing, such as the recognition of facial emotions, interpretation of eye gaze and eye contact and the recognition of people across changes in facial expression. The software for Let's Face It! is available for download (free of charge) on the Let's Face It! website. In addition to the software, the website features quizzes aimed at determining your facial recognition skills, downloadable hands-on activities designed to compliment the Let's Face It! curriculum, and information about our popular "Face Camps". Stay tuned in to the website for information regarding upcoming workshops about how to implement the Let's FaceIt! curriculum."