Blog Post #12

Assistive technology is something great to use in schools. Assistive technology is used to help children with learning disabilities. iPads are commonly used in schools now. I decided to do research on my own. I found several apps for iPads that have been reviewed for use in schools. The National Center for Learning Disabilities gives an extensive list of apps that are great to assist in education. You can view the list of writing difficulty apps here. The Dragon Dictation app was very appealing to me because students can talk and the app recognizes the voice and turns it into text. They also list apps to help with different learning disabilities. There are so many different apps that could be helpful in the classroom now.

Something else that I think would be really helpful to students struggling in math, is a talking calculator. The calculator will read aloud the numbers, symbols, answers, and etc. This vocalizes everything for student who have problems with mathematics. I also believe that it could help students with ADD or ADHD, but helping them focus on the task at hand. I personally can get side tracked, and if a calculator was talking to me, I believe I would also pay more attention. More information on talking calculators can be found here.

Another great assistive technology is screen readers. They have devices for this, programs, and applications. I know for a fact that Macs have screen readers on them, since I have a Mac myself. If you do not have a Mac then you can download software for this. A great example of software that can be downloaded is JAWS. This software is made specifically for Windows computers. It's known to be a great product to help educate blind students!

These are just a few of the assistive technologies that stuck out to me. There are so many other things that you can use to assist children with learning disabilities in the classroom. Technology makes learning so much easier for LD students and we need to take advantage of what we have available to us.