| Description of good practice: |
The most common specific learning impairments are dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia. Students with these conditions experience a significant delay acquiring one or some of the learning skills: reading, writing, calculating, etc.;and demonstrate a discrepancy between achievement and intelligence ability. The exact causes of specific learning disabilities are unknown.
Learning-impaired students may have problems with oral expression, listening, written expression, basic reading skills or comprehension, and maths. Moreover, this situation provokes complications in general schooling, e.g. acquisition and memorization, autonomous understanding of complex texts, problem-solving.
According to the recent scientific publications, such difficulties stay on throughout life, though some improvement or recovery may happen over time. For this reason, to support education and rehabilitation some tricks to overcome them as well as some AT tools to avoid them are handy. The computer can effectively alleviate and help the schooling of these students and become their AT tool for learning.
Possible AT solutions for writing and developing of writing skills:
1. Using the keyboard:
The availability of the whole range of letters shortens the time needed to remember the
right letter shape and write it. To push digital keys is easier than to write with a pen,
especially if a student makes frequent errors.
2. Using the spelling corrector:
It prevents from making a huge number of mistakes in writing words; students can correct
their document before printing it, and get advice from the built-in thesaurus.
3. Using word prediction and word completion software:
Aids correct writing and can accelerate the writing rate; some systems have practical
features related to grammar and syntax.
4. Using software to create conceptual maps and working plans:
To facilitate meta-cognitive activities of content planning and outlining in a logical
structure to circumvent short, poor, and incoherent texts.
5. Using voice recognition as input system:
An alternative to the keyboard to avoid spelling mistakes, tiredness and to support long
and complex writing activities.
Possible AT solutions for reading and developing of reading skills:
1. For mild reading difficulties:
Software to change the appearance of the text by modifying the font, dimensions,
background color and contrast, spacing between letters and between lines. Rehabilitation
and educational software to improve reading speed and accuracy.
2. Severe reading difficulties:
Speech synthesizers, OCRs (Optical Character Recognition Systems). |
