scrivener
04-22-2006, 12:32 PM
How many of you are using assistive technology in the classroom? How many of you have students using it on their own?
My school, which specializes in students with dyslexia and other language-oriented learning differences, is working to grow in this area; we've had some assistive tech courses, and we've sent teachers to national conferences, and we just got a huge grant from Best Buy for the purpose of adding to our hardware and software in this area. We have Kurzweil 3000 readers on a bunch of on-campus computers, and a couple of Kurzweil scanning programs, too. We're nowhere near where we want to be, but each year we get more and more students to use the software effectively.
One area we struggle to get up to speed is in voice-to-text software. We had ViaVoice on most of our computers, but when we switched up to OSX, we never updated ViaVoice, so now we really have nothing except the resident voice-text application in Windows XP. Many of our students with personal laptops are using this.
It's a lot of work to attain mastery of this stuff, and many of our students don't seem to want to put that work into it, despite testimony from older students that learning how to use it early pays off big-time later.
Are any of you having similar problems getting students to depend on assistive tech? What's the assistive tech situation like at your school?
My school, which specializes in students with dyslexia and other language-oriented learning differences, is working to grow in this area; we've had some assistive tech courses, and we've sent teachers to national conferences, and we just got a huge grant from Best Buy for the purpose of adding to our hardware and software in this area. We have Kurzweil 3000 readers on a bunch of on-campus computers, and a couple of Kurzweil scanning programs, too. We're nowhere near where we want to be, but each year we get more and more students to use the software effectively.
One area we struggle to get up to speed is in voice-to-text software. We had ViaVoice on most of our computers, but when we switched up to OSX, we never updated ViaVoice, so now we really have nothing except the resident voice-text application in Windows XP. Many of our students with personal laptops are using this.
It's a lot of work to attain mastery of this stuff, and many of our students don't seem to want to put that work into it, despite testimony from older students that learning how to use it early pays off big-time later.
Are any of you having similar problems getting students to depend on assistive tech? What's the assistive tech situation like at your school?