Assistive Technology in Special Education: What It Is and Several Examples

Aside from assistive technology, some services also help students learn more freely. They assist those who can’t handle regular deadlines or need an extra example of high-quality academic writing.

Let’s talk more about the technology used in modern classrooms to provide sufficient quality of education for every child.

Assistive Technology Used in Special Education Classrooms

There are thousands of technology types. They all help people with disabilities live, study, communicate, and work more conveniently.

Here’s a portion of examples of assistive tech that can be used in special education:

• Equipment that aids mobility like scooters, canes, walkers, wheelchairs, as well as curb slopes and other modifications for easier, more independent movement. Prosthetic equipment is also a part of mobility aid.
• Equipment that aids vision and hearing impairments. Hearing aids allow students to be a part of common lectures. This helps socializing and prevents certain mental disorders that may come with a disability.
• Equipment and services that aid cognition to help students ease the everyday challenges they have when studying. A wide range of assistive devices and services are connected to this group. There’s a group of items for every individual since every child is different and has various needs.
• Equipment that helps students who have sensory and mobility impairments use mobile devices and computers. As a result, they can participate in the studying process to the fullest. To this group, we can relate screen readers and image enlargement software. Also, voice control and recognition, text to voice converters, and so on.
• Small yet so helpful, book holders, special pens and pencils, automatic holders and turners. These are also a part of assistive technology that make students’ lives easier.
• Captions for video materials and scripts for audio materials. Spellcheck, grammar, punctuation, and other services aren’t appreciated enough yet they can make a huge difference.
• Modifications to halls, doorways, etc. to help people with disabilities move more freely. Educational establishments must have wider doorways, all kinds of bars and ramps to grab and hold onto.
• Special lightweight equipment to provide students with the ability to take part in sports and other active outdoor and indoor activities.
• Lighting equipment can also be a part of an assistive technology set. Special lights are put around all kinds of switches, boards, etc.

By being active learners, people with disabilities usually feel better about themselves and don’t see their limitations as obstacles. Just imagine, someone who isn’t able of speaking can use special voice synthesizers nowadays to participate in any lesson. Earlier, they would’ve been transferred to homeschooling or to a special group, which would put a lot of stress on them.

Such tech also provides teachers with many more educational possibilities. Making the learning process individual is sometimes impossible due to the lack of resources. Not everything depends on the qualifications of a teacher. So having the necessary services and devices at hand is enormously helpful.

Assistive Technology in Everyday Life

Assistive tech has also become a part of our day-to-day lives. For example, curb slopes and cuts that were initially created for people who had orthopedic difficulties. They are now also used in grocery shops and other places for stroller or grocery cart movement. 

A custom essay writing service is a part of a lot of students’ lives to provide a more understandable example of any assignment a child has to complete. Professional writing helps children hand in every paper in time. This helps if they have difficulties with studies connected to a disability.

A piece of technology like the optical character reader was created for people who couldn’t read written documents. It’s now widely used by businesses to convert written text into editable content. This saves hundreds of hours of labor.

If we can use such tech for our benefit, why can’t we provide schools with it? For a lot of people, those are just helping instruments so we don’t have to overwork or carry a grocery bag all the way to the car. But to many it’s essential for moving around freely and learning well.

The Importance of Assistive Technology

Technology has become an amazing equalizer. We’ve come a long way but there’s more to design, create, and implement in modern kindergartens, schools, colleges, and universities.

We have to learn more about disabilities. We should recognize not only those connected to mobility or senses. There are also difficulties with cognition and info perception. When only a little study was done, a lot of children were perceived as spoiled or unwilling to learn. But in reality, they had limitations like dyslexia and other conditions. Nowadays, all these don’t become an obstacle to learning if schools implement special education. And technology and services assist enormously in that.

It’s crucial that we realize that every child is different, whether they have a disability or not. Education must become more individually adapted if we want to achieve better results globally. The times are gone when the curriculum was the same for everyone – we have to pay attention to the needs of every child.

---

Author: Lauren Bradshaw, a specialist from a professional essay writing company Custom Writings which is committed to provide students with custom-written papers in 80+ disciplines.