Article 5: Assistive Technology for Kids with Learning Disabilities: An Overview

Summary:

This article discusses assistive technologies that can be useful to students who have learning disabilities.  Assistive technology is any device that helps bypass or compensate for an individual’s specific learning deficit.  Since the category of learning disabilities is so large, it goes on to discuss many different types and how they would be useful to different students.  Something to remember is that not all assistive technologies are good for every student with a learning disability.  It is a mission to find the best and most appropriate assistive technology for the students in order to help them through the challenge; compensating for a deficit that the student encounters in their ability to learn. 

Stanberry and Raskind divide the article into two sections; ‘What types of learning problems does assistive technology address?’ and ‘What kinds of assistive technology tools are available?’.  The types of learning problems that this article addresses are a student’s problems with listening, math, organizing and memory, reading and writing. The article also emphasizes that a student may have a difficulty in one subject like writing but may not struggle when they are reading or doing math.  The assistive technology tools that are discussed vary based on what the student may need.  For example, they have books on tape, speech synthesizers and talking calculators for students that have difficulties reading.  They also have electronic math work sheets, spell checkers, proofreading programs and word prediction software for students that have difficulties writing.  

Response:

This article would be very valuable to anyone looking, especially a teacher or a parent, for a source that supplied a list of possible assistive technologies that their student or child could use.  It would even be useful as a start to your research; to see the different types of things available and recommended for different learning disabilities.  With such a wide range of different learning disabilities, it is difficult to find or even basically comprehend what types of technologies might be available.  Unfortunately, these are not cures for learning disabilities, but these assistive technologies are aimed to aid the students in developing their learning further.  The assistive technology that I found most interesting was the abbreviation expanders.  This uses word processing and allows users to create, store and reuse abbreviations for frequent words which can save the user keystrokes and ensure for proper spelling as coded by the program previously. 

Some students say that these sorts of things are not fair because they think that the device the student gets to use makes it easy; but this is not the case.  It gets to an issue of fairness and how it does not mean equal.  Without assistive technologies, the classroom itself is not a fair environment.  If it was, then it would mean that every student is the same which we know is not the case.  Therefore, in order to make it fair, we can offer these assistive technologies to give every student the opportunity to learn because these tools are not in order to make learning easier but instead the process of learning so that they can get an education.   

APA Citation:

Stanberry, K., & Raskind, M. (2009). Assistive technology for kids with learning disabilities: An overview. Retrieved from http://www.readingrockets.org/article/33074/