Technology in Special Education

Technology is pivotal for special education students. I have used a digital camera as part of an assignment for a grade 3 student with autism successfully. Early in the school year, in cooperation with his E.A., I assigned him a project to take a picture of all of the staff of the school and pay attention to where their room or office was so that he could draw a map. This was my first position as a L.R.T. and I had little or no appreciation for how difficult this assignment would be for an autistic student, yet he persevered. My true goal in this assignment was to assist him in understanding pronouns, which to date he had not used. After much work and practice with his E.A., he finally presented his modified map, pointing out the pictures of the staff members and where he could find them, using pronouns. He was very excited because he took the pictures, I was very excited because he was using pronouns correctly. It was not very long after that until we started to see pronouns in his written work as well. Later, as an intermediate L.R.T. the use of the digital camera eased the transition to highschool for another of my students with autism, I allowed him to use the camera as he visited his new school with his mother, in order to take a picture of his new teacher and E.A. as well as classroom and cafeteria. This enabled his mom to review the pictures at home and calm him down about leaving our school. He had been experiencing great anxiety about the tranition and was starting to revert to stimming behaviours that he had not used in years, having the pictures to talk about what was coming next, really seemed to help. I have used Kurzweil, a text to voice program, to help some of my L.D. students research projects and Dragon Naturally Speaking to assist in printing projects and assignments with amazing success. One student in particular became so proficient that she is now a student mentor and trains other students on Dragon. The real reward to me though is the sense of accomplishment and independence this technology brings to these individuals. On a personal note, I was in the midst of having my son diagnosed with L.D. which is perhaps the reason I attended a workshop given by an L.D. P.H.D. student that was titled Technology in Special Education. That workshop inspired me to contact the board I.T. person and learn how to install and teach my kids how to use text to voice and voice to text software. As a parent of a now diagnosed L.D. son, technology gave me hope for his future, and the future of all my students. Finally, I'd like to mention the gifted student who I worked with in my first year as a L.R.T., I remember giving him an open-ended project using the internet as his research tool. He ran with it, and his classroom teacher was so impressed because he was having a great deal of difficulty with this student's behaviour. Having this student in my room to use the computer, allowed me to assist him with his social skills as well, which is often an area of concern with gifted students. All of this allowed him to have a very successful grade 8 year. I think often as teachers, we are at a loss when we have a gifted student in our classrooms. My advice is use all the technology you can and secondly, allow them a part in planning their curriculum and keep it as open ended as possible.

Sonia