How Can Assistive Technology Help Students with Disabilities?

Technology can be a great tool for students who have learning disabilities. Assistive tools have been helping them leverage their strengths and work around or compensate for specific learning problems. These supports have been keys to helping users become more independent in school and accomplish tasks on various levels like:

Mastering grade-level content. Assistive Technology can present educational materials in audio or visual forms.

Improving writing and organizational skills. Assistive Technology can enable students with learning disabilities or autism do things like developing a concept map for a research paper, and write using grade-level vocabulary or words they otherwise would not be able to use without a computer because of poor spelling skills.

Working towards grade-level reading skills. The computer can either read texts digitally or presents it at a lower grade level for students with reading disabilities or visual impairments.

Improving note-taking skills. Many students with disabilities have difficulty taking notes in longhand because of poor spelling, writing, and eye-hand coordination skills.

Mastering educational concepts that would otherwise have been beyond their reach. Students can experience abstract concepts such as the growth of a flower through 3-D computer simulations.

What Types of Assistive Technology Can Help Students in the Classroom?

It is imperative to make sure that an assistive technology works towards an individual's strengths. For instance, if someone has problem writing, their spelling and grammar are poor. However, he or she may be an articulate speaker. Instead of simply providing them a standard word processing program, they might be better off with speech-recognition software, a program that converts the spoken word to text. In another example, if a child is having trouble reading but can easily understand spoken words, then an Optical Character Recognition system with computerized speech that can read a book out loud for them could provide a great deal of benefit.

Computer-based instruction can support other learning activities. There are Assistive Tools or software that gives immediate positive feedback and provide motivation and focus for students with learning disabilities. Some special software

can enable students with developmental disabilities to compensate for motor disturbances, organize behavior, and communicate with a minimum of stress, fatigue, and misunderstanding. Talking software can help a child hear the words while at the same time seeing them on the page while reading. Word processing with word prediction helps children with limited vocabularies, as well as children whose use of a keyboard is limited by motor impairments, to express them in writing with far less frustration. Special software can also help a child with attention deficit disorder to reduce the effect of external stimuli, increasing his or her ability to focus on class work. For example, a textbook can be "rewritten" at a lower grade level or shown graphically for students who have reading disabilities.

It can easily be presented in large print, in a different color, or with different backgrounds for students who have visual impairments. It can be read aloud via computer for students who are blind or non-readers. It can even be presented in a different language to students for whom English is a second language.

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Other article you will find interesting: What Does the Law Say About Assistive Technology? What Is Assistive Technology?