This week in class we are diving into special education and the different assistive technologies that are available to students with learning disabilities and differences. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart because my educational licensure is in Special Education K-12. Over the years, I have been extremely lucky to work with students from kindergarten to adulthood all with varied disabilities. The type of disability that I have chosen to focus on this week is emotional disturbance (ED). I have chosen this category of disabilities because it is the area in which I have the most experience and I am assuming not many other students in my class will choose to cover ED.
According to IDEA Act, an emotional disturbance is a condition that negatively effects a students educational performance and occurs over a long period of time. It can effect an individuals ability to learn, maintain relationships, act appropriately under normal circumstances, be happy, overcome fears associated with school or staff problems. According to, www.nichcy.com, some characteristics of a student with an emotional disturbance is hyperactivity, aggression, failure to interact with others, immaturity and learning difficulties. In my own experience I have found that the biggest challenge as a teacher of students with emotional disturbances is gaining their trust. Some, but by no means all of the students with ED that I have worked with come from poverty, foster care systems, and even have been in and out of jail. These are the students who really struggle to trust educators and peers because they live such a transient lifestyle that they rarely form trusting relationships, even with their own families. Another struggle that I frequently ran into in these ED classrooms was being able to reason with students. In many cases there is a very fine line that dictates a student with EDs ability to handle situations calmly as opposed to becoming violent.
As educators, it is part of our job description to maintain control of our classroom and at times it can be very difficult to do this when teaching in an ED classroom. It can be extremely helpful to use some forms of assistive technology to help keep order in the classroom. When I researched assistive technologies in the classroom a lot of the results showed low-tech options which is not really what I was looking for. This includes a lot of behavioral tracking charts which are very useful in working with students who have ED, especially at the elementary level. One assistive technology that I came across that I have used before includes a “motivader.” This is a device that is used for students who have a tendency to zone out and get easily distracted. It looks like a pager and you can attach it to the student or set it on the students desk and set it at certain intervals to vibrate which will in theory, regain the students attention before he or she gets to distracted, lost and frustrated. In my own experience, I have found that this is certainly not a tool that can be used for every student with ED that has attention problems .I once had a high school student get frustrated with the vibration every 45 seconds and he chucked the motivader at me while I was teaching, needless to say we never used this with him again. However, on the up side, I have used this tool to help a student whos main source of ED behavior was attention deficit and she wanted to do well in school but could not keep her focus and would get very aggressive when this would lead to frustration. With her, the motivader worked like a charm, she just needed a reminder to stay focused and it really helped with her frustration, depression and aggression. More information on the Motivader, can be found at http://habitchange.com/.
The other type of assistive technology that I would like to talk about is using ipods, ipads, and educational video games as a bargaining tool. In the research that I did, it seems like a common theme to most peoples knowledge of using assistive technology with students who are labled ED, is to basically bribe them to accomplish certain tasks and to give them a goal to reach. I found that in the elementary setting especially this can be very effective. A lot of times, a student with ED will have an emotional breakdown or fit of aggression surrounding an assignment that they just do not want to do. One way that you can get a student to complete a task is to tell them they can have for example, “15 minutes to play educational apps on the ipad once they have completed the assignment.” Like I said, in elementary this often works well, but my experience with middle and high school bargaining like this usually is not very helpful. I also found that by making promises like awarding ipad use upon task completion, and then following through with those promises, a teacher can really build a students trust which is really important when working with students with ED who tend to lack trust in anyone. More information on this topic can be found at http://education4ed.weebly.com/assistive-technology.html.
I chose to cover two high-tech devices that can be used as assistive technologies in the field of ED however, most of the assistive technologies available are in the low-tech form meaning that they do not involve a computer or device at all. I think the future of assistive technologies in this field will evolve some of these low tech solutions into mid and high tech functions. I think that there will be a lot of apps and software that are created in the near future to help students to track their own progress and success on a technological level as opposed to on paper. I also feel that as more people research this category of disabilities as they pertain to education, we will gain a greater insight as to why students with ED are suffering from these disturbances and how we can help them to overcome these issues. Unfortunately, I also think that you will see less and less of educational inclusion involving students with ED because a lot of these students have that aggressive demeanor which can be a danger to “regular ed students.” I think that inclusion in a regular education setting is vital to these students but unfortunately, based on the schools I have been in, I think there is just too much of a liability for students who become aggressive. I hope that you learned a little about assistive technologies and how they may help students with Emotional disturbances. Below I have listed some resources that I found helpful in researching this topic and of course, I will update them to my symbaloo as well.
Sources:
http://www.atstar.org/atinfo/info_disabilities_behavioral.html
http://education4ed.weebly.com/assistive-technology.html.
http://habitchange.com/.
http://nichcy.org/laws/idea
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