Incorporating Assistive Technology into the Classroom

There is a lot more to making a classroom accessible to all different learners than UDL.  As an educator, you may have a student in the classroom that needs special assistive technology to help aide them navigate and succeed in your classroom.

The types of students I am thinking about at the moment are: the students that are hard of hearing and the students that cannot speak. 

There are many different forms of assistive technology for individuals that are hard of hearing.  Since this blog is about students in an educational setting, I will quickly explain assistive listening devices.  “ALDs help reduce the effect of an ‘acoustically unfriendly room’.  They catch a desired sound… as cleanly as possible and amplify it for students who are hard of hearing.” (Dell, Newton, & Petroff, 2012, p. 142-143)



(http://www.centrumsound.com/Audiology/images/fig2.jpg, 2014)

This is important so that a student is able to hear a lecture/lesson even when the teacher is moving around the room with their head down (demonstrating an activity – a science lab for example) or facing the blackboard/whiteboard.

There are multiple different forms of assistive technology for individuals that cannot speak; called alternative and augmentative communication devices (AAC).  AAC is typically referred to as augmentative communication; which is all about helping individuals who cannot speak to have the ability to interact with others (Dell, Newton, & Petroff, 2012, p. 150).  Since my experience is mostly within autistic support classrooms, this form of assistive technology (AT) is what I’m most familiar with.  Sign language is a form of AT, as well as alphabet boards, and of course computerized ‘talkers’.

(http://www.misericordia.edu/images/slp/SLP_technology_AAC_019.jpg, 2014)