Elementary Accommodations
Apple has created a world totally accessible to the world of Special Education. Apple has done a great job to not just provide the accommodations on their iOS system, but also making OS X accessible to special education students. Apple has four main categories for all of their platforms: Learning and Literacy, Vision, Hearing, and Physical and Motor Skills.
- Learning and Literacy: On iOS, which encompasses your iPads and iPhones, learning and literacy entails accommodations such as:
- Guided access: Allowing students who have a difficult time to story board out what they are trying to communicate through the use of their iPads.
- Speak Selection/Siri: The phone does the talking! Grab a selection of text and the phone will read it aloud to you.
- Word Prediction: I have personally found this annoying, but I can see the good that it would do for students who have difficulties with spelling.
- Vision: Most of of the iOS accommodations in this category are a mix of speaking and vision enhancements.
- Invert colors: Probably the coolest thing that I discovered in this research is the ability to chance the colors of the phone. iOS gives you the opportunity to switch your background to black and your test to white. I have seen this also be available on OS X.
- Zoom: No this is not the bad guy from the Flash. This is actually the ability to make things bigger on your device. Quite literally you can make your screen bigger! This is also a function on the OS X system.
- Voice Over: This accommodation helps students to understand what they are seeing on the screen.
- Hearing: These accommodations look to ensure connectivity for students who are hard of hearing.
- Mono Audio: Typically audio comes in two different channels, that is why you hear music more in one year at times over the other. Mono Audio allows students to hear both channels in both ears, to enhance hearing.
- Closed Captions: Not really just an Apple thing, but still great that they have provided it in their system.
- Garage Band: Definitely not the first thing that comes to mind when you think accommodations. BUT, for deaf students they can use the audio wave file to see just how loud the files actually are.
- Physical and Motor Skills: Oddly enough, I have actually used this portion of the iOS device on my iPhone.
- Assistive Touch: This is the part that I have used. Under setting your find an option of assistive touch. It works the same as any of the other apps on the phone. Easy to use and navigate.
- Siri/Dictation: Again your phone talks to you, see above!
Apple is not the only thing out there to help students with disabilities though. There are many apps that can be used to accommodate learning. Below are just some that can be useful at the elementary school level.
Dragon Dictation: This is a voice to text application. For students who have problems scribing and/or typing this is a great alternative. This is an app that has been designed for the apple products, specifically iPads and iPhones. Many applications like this, including Apple's built in speech to text function have been found to have problems. This app has excellent reviews about its accuracy, which is incredibly important for students with disabilities. Due to the higher level of accuracy advertised, I would be more inclined to use this with students as opposed to the built in options. Here is the link for the apple store.
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Mindomo: A concept mapping /planning / outlining website, Mindomo gives a technological way for students. Students with fine motor skills, can use this to complete pre planning for writing activities. This site is not geared towards towards just students with disabilities. Other students can use this, which allows those students who are disabled to feel more comfortable using it. Mindomo is also great for collaboration amongst peers in working towards a common goal. Multiple users can work on the same project.
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Model Me Going Places: Model Me Going Places is an app that helps to provide students examples of children at different places in the community. This is a great app for students who struggle with social situations. The app is specifically designed for students with autism spectrum disorders. It intertwines music and video to enhance strengths that students with disabilities already have. Again this is an app that works on iPads/iPods, so its availability is limited to Apple products.
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