There are more tools now as compared to a few years ago in order to help special needs students. Technology companies are striving to make their products more inclusive and accessible for people with disabilities to reduce or eliminate barriers to learning for students in special education. It just keeps getting better and better.
Assistive technology devices can be a game-changer for special needs students by increasing capabilities with people with disabilities and learning differences. Students, in general, have different learning styles and fortunately, technology can adapt to those learning styles by delivering the content in a way that better adapts to their preferences and needs.
Technology in special education has many advantages for both teachers and students. While using tech tools, teachers can individualize learning and teach in smaller groups in comparison to traditional teaching. Some of the benefits are personalized learning, improve academic skills, reduce anxiety, easier communication, etc. Technology is awesome, but one of its biggest drawbacks is the cost. Tech tools such as smart pens, are expensive and not all the students can afford it. The smart pen is the most popular tool. Another issue is the lack of training. Both teachers and students must be trained to learn how to incorporate tech tools into their classrooms.
There are more than 4,000 assistive technologic tools designed for education such as iPads and tablets, voice-recognition technology, communication boards, text-to-voice, and apps. We can highlight the use of apps because they are free or low-cost tools which help a lot. Some of the best apps for special needs students are:
- Seeing AI: it is a talking camera that can recognize objects in the room to create audible descriptions of those objects.
- Conversation Planner: this tool helps your kid to prepare for interactions with people in many different scenarios.
- Livescribe Aegir pen: record audio while you are handwriting notes.
- Stop, Breathe, and Think Kids; offers activities that can be very helpful to kids with ADHD symptoms.
- Immersive Reader (by Microsoft); includes many tools to improve the readability of text.
- Smartphone Magnification; enables you to magnify text or objects, that while using your smartphone camera, but first you might check if your smartphone has a built-in magnifying glass.
- Automatic Closed Captioning in Google Slides; allows teachers to turn on closed captioning in the presenter mode, and all that they are saying appear in the text in real-time.
