Don’t Be Afraid of Technology
What would you say to parents and teachers who don’t know much about technology and might be a little intimidated?
Don’t be afraid! A lot of these tools are really easy to use. For many of the assistive technology tools out there today, we often find that students either know how to use it already, or in five minutes they will figure it out. And obviously that’s not true for every student or every tool, but in many cases we just need to give students an opportunity and they will find the solution. Teachers often feel, because it’s something new to them, that they must teach the student how to use the assistive technology. Often what we need to do is just create the environment in which the technology can be used. We need to identify the barriers that might prevent the student from using the technology. If I have a student who’s using a laptop to read everything out loud, then handing them a paper copy of a worksheet is an immediate barrier. How do they get that piece of paper onto the computer? We have to think about those barriers and clear them out.