Friday, August 3, 2007

Learning to Write: Technology for Students With Disabilities in Secondary Inclusive Classrooms

Title - Learning to Write: Technology for Students with Disabilities in Secondary Inclusive Classrooms

Author - Patricia M. Barbetta, Linda A. Spears-Bunton

Author's Purpose for Writing - To review technologies that help students with disabilities master the writing process

What are the main points made in the review of the literature? Each stage of the writing process presents challenges for students with disabilities. Fortunately, there are technologies
available to students who struggle with reading and writing.

Digital text technology: A scanner with optical character recognition (OCR) software can copy text from a website and paste it onto a word processing program. The text can be modified by changing font, color, background, or by highlighting words. Autosummarize selects main idea sentences from a document. With Across media transformation, text is predsented in a different medium such as auditory. As students type, text is read back. The Reading Pen - As the pen is passed over the txt, the words are highlighted on an LCD screen and pronounced.

Text to Speech Technology: With Inteelitalk 3, students listen to and edit their own work because text can be read back

Word Prediction technology: As student types, software predicts the word, reducing the number of keystrokes the student has to make.

Conclusion - Writing is difficult, especially for students with disabilities. English and special ed teachers need to work closely together to plan strategies. Technology can be effectiv tool in helping special needs students learn to write.

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