Assistive Technology

Ever since we talked and read about assistive technology, it has been on my mind much more than normal. Having a physically handicapped nephew that is in preschool, assistive technology has frequented family conversations for a while. Now I've begun looking at how I have been incorporating it and whether I always use it when I should.
My nephew, who only has 1 finger, requires many special devices. I can't imagine someone denying him the use of his special scissors or his prosthetic hand! After class, I really began looking at times when I may not have given a child all of the tools that he/she needed to be as successful as they could. Instead of dwelling on what I may or may not have done in the past, I have committed to trying to evaluate what the needs of my kids are and giving them the tools they need.
An example of giving this change, happened just the other day in one of my math classes. I have a very sweet child that has an extremely difficult time in math. We were going over how to reduce fractions. We had taken notes and practiced. The next day, the kids were doing some independent practice that was going to be graded. My sweet student was struggling terribly with remembering the steps, or what to do when and why. After working with him one-on-one for quite awhile, I asked the LD resource teacher to work with him. After she had worked with him, he was still struggling terribly. I suggested to her that he use a calculator to complete his sheet. (Now, I should say that we have a class set of the fabulous TI-15 calculators. These calculators will allow the user to input fractions and keep the fraction as a fraction!! for more info... ) So, the LD resource teacher spent 3 or 4 minutes showing him how to reduce a fraction on the calculator. (He already knew how to input a fraction and was very good at adding and subtracting fractions and mixed numbers on this calculator). He finished the worksheet in a decent amount of time and turned it in. I quickly graded it and gave it back to him. I struggled with whether or not I should give him the 100% he earned with the calculator, then I thought back to our conversations about assistive technology. When I gave back his paper with the 100% on the top he looked at me a little confused. I went back to my desk to try and grade and conference with a few more students. He came up to me, gave me a big hug and said "Mrs. Medley, I never got a 100% before!" Wow, did I feel good and bad in one instant. Good- with this calculator that I let him use, he was able to be successful. Bad-how many other times could I have let him use something to help him be more successful.
Within the same week, I was working on my Literacy Through Photography Project for another teacher, when I was approached by a student that was editing his paper. He asked me if he could print his paper (he had typed it in Word). When I walked up to the computer screen I noticed that most of the words were underlined in green and red. I asked him if he thought any of his words were misspelled. He did, so I explained that the red lines indicated that Word did not recognize the word he typed in other words, he probably had misspelled it. I showed him that he could right-click on the word to see a list of correctly spelled words that he could choose from. If he saw the word in the list, he could click on it and his misspelled word would be replaced. If he did not see the word there, either Word wasn't sure what he was trying to spell or it was a word that it didn't know. We tried a few together, some that were in the list and one that wasn't. Then I let him finish the rest of the page. When he was finished his page looked perfect. He was really proud of himself!

After my recent pleasant experiences with assistive technology I will continue to try and assess what my kids need and give them access to those tools. I hope to get better at determining when kids need help and how much they need. I often get worried that I will give them so much help, they will get lazy or too reliant on tools that they don't really need.