Technological Tools for Assisting Students with Special and/or Diverse Needs and Noting the Specific Learning Outcomes for each Technology:
The article “Special Technological possibilities for Students with Special Needs” is a very informative and helpful article. It discusses multiple different technologies available for students with various special needs. It discusses how assistive technology devices can take many different forms depending on the special needs. Some of these needs include technologies required to assist in different language and vision-related problems, and can assist with speech output, word predictions, and speech recognition. “Talking software” in which there are verbal directions or verbal reinforcement like “good job” and “correct” as well as verbal outputs that can guide students verbally through software and learning are great successes for students with visual problems. There are also many online books in which the books are read out loud and in crisp and clean voices at a slow pace that also act as verbal aids to those with visual problems. There are also programs that read sentences back to students after they create them as well as whole paragraphs so people who are blind can type their work and hear and understand their writing as a whole.
This article also touches base with programs that hare available to students with language deficits, such as “Co:Writer” and “textHELP!” These programs predict the words a user types and brings up a list of words they might use in the context of their sentence, and they can scroll through the different words and choose which they need. However, there are some criticisms of this program that the article addresses. This includes teachers believing it may slow some students down because after each keystroke they now have a new list of words to select from and it takes a considerable amount of time to review each new set of choices. Teachers argue that the time required to look at all the different words may “take away from the creative element of writing,” and that it may in fact be more work for the student. This article is a great resource that exemplifies different technologies available for students with special needs and describes and explains their usefulness as well.
http://people.virginia.edu/~har4y/edlf345/elementary/files/special_needs.pdf
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It would be very interesting to do research on the different speech recognition software created for people with visual impairments and see which one proves to be most accurate. I have played with the free speech tool on Microsoft word and it does not seem very accurate. These tools seem very interesting and are definitely a benefit for students with special needs. It just depends on the success of the software.
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