Weighing in from personal experience rather than research. Because, frankly, if research that says you need to write by hand in order to learn was correct my DD would not have learned most of what she knows...
Pemberley when I was posting here more regularly I think you were still at the first school, at the beginning of this fight for your daughter. It's so wonderful to hear what has worked and the gains that have been made.
I noticed problems with DD's fine motor and hand-eye coordination before her 18 month check up but it took until age 5 to convince the pediatrician to refer her for an eval.correct my DD would not have learned most of what she knows...
Completely off topic, but I noticed my youngest child's speech declining at 18 months. I took her to a speech therapist who laughed at me and said she was so far advanced for age norms there could not possibly be anything wrong... I eventually got her in to an ENT who found her ears utterly clogged with wax, they were cleaned and her speech became clearer. And she's been having them cleaned by that ENT every few months ever since...Mothers do make useful observations, imagine if we were listened to more often.
By that time kindergarten was looming and the OT had to focus on getting her to be able to hold a pencil and try to form letters rather than the many OT tasks that should have been explored first. DD spent the next 7 years with OT's working on her handwriting. Painful, frustrating and not a good use of her time. By 4th grade the OT's said she wouldn't make much more progress and wanted to end the sessions. DD herself said "Mom you can't run away from your problems - you know that - right?" She then went on to explain she may not always have access to her technology and wanted to be able to write a short note by hand if needed so we continued working on handwriting even though we knew it would never be her means of communicating ideas.
In 5th grade we moved to cursive. Most schools no longer teach cursive but I had read (probably here...) that it's easier for many dysgraphic students because you don't have to pick the pencil up between letters. The OT's used the program ""Cursive Without Tears" which my daughter said "is most definitely cursive WITH tears for me..." She was not one who benefitted from cursive and still cannot read cursive - either handwritten or a font that resembles it. We dropped it in 6th grade in favor of an all AT approach.correct my DD would not have learned most of what she knows...
I had been pushing AT since 1st grade and faced initial pushback from a well intentioned but woefully misinformed school OT who said it was not developmentally appropriate to introduce keyboarding prior to 4th grade. She insisted that kids needed to learn handwriting in the early grades or they would never develop the skill. (Once I convinced the 1st grade teacher to scribe a story for DD and she compared the level of detail in the 2 page result to the 4 or so handwritten lines DD was able to write herself in a longer amount of time she was convinced but couldn't do much to help convince the OT...) Got approved for an AT eval end of 1st grade but nothing was actually done until the end of 2nd grade. By third grade she was in a Spec Ed school with her program emphasizing AT.
This is exhausting just to read.
We started with a chain of AT specialists who would introduce an app or program and then leave DD and her teachers to figure out how to implement it.
This really speaks to me. I tried to get EquatIO working for my middle daughter last year, but their model was set up around working with schools not an individual parent who had to find a way of making the app fit the school (rather than a teacher deciding to use the app for their class and thus being well set up for it's use). School would clearly have let her use EquatIO - if I could figure out how to make it work without them having to do anything or change anything...
There was a young Spec ed teacher at the school who took the lead on troubleshooting the AT but while better than handwriting still was far from streamlined. Each technology glitch derailed DD's ability to complete her work.
This is an obvious risk/issue which I had not considered enough, but really does speak to why various things have failed for us through the years, and why technology seems less scary if we are homeschooling, as the parent, teacher and technology "owner" I will be constantly aware of and remediating the problems until we have a system that works, and there just doens't seem to be that in school.
She soon learned that she couldn't really rely on anything other than her ears and her spoken voice. She primarily came to rely on oral testing to show her knowledge. We did discover that the built in voice-to-text on iPad 2 or higher worked just fine with her voice after trying and failing to get Dragon to work early on.
Thanks for this tip re the build in voice to text.
Getting the right AT specialist was critical. In 6th grade our district placed her in their one day a week TAG program and actually contracted to bring in an OT to work with her for an hour developing whatever AT approach would be needed for that day's classwork. The OT's however refused to work with her on AT. Apparently at some point the 2 fields diverged. Older OT's were trained in AT but for younger ones it was a separate discipline. Much to DD's chagrine they insisted on using that hour to work on handwriting which had previously been declared futile. So while DD struggled to figure out AT solutions on her own (with technology that kept glitching and without the young sped teacher around to help troubleshoot) she also continued to work on handwriting. Very frustrating situation.
This just makes me so mad for her and you!
After a few false starts we found the perfect AT person who said it was her job to not only determine the best technology, apps and programs but work with DD on knowing which to use when, troubleshoot, streamline, train the school and teachers, etc. THAT'S what you probably need.
I am just not sure that such a person even exists in my city (or possibly in the country)
It took months to untangle all the mess created by previous AT snafu's. She had the school district purchase new equipment (DD uses a chromebook, an iPad Pro, iPhone 8 and an older mini she was gifted and used as a life preserver when the district issued iPad malfunctioned so badly.) She has a long list of apps and programs to do just about everything. The AT specialist's mantra is "Work smarter not harder" because DD had gotten used to just spending more and more hours doing things in a convoluted way when she had no AT support. (She would write, copy, edit, email to herself, copy, place in another app, etc whatever she needed to do when she didn't have a single program to do everything for her...) She worked with DD weekly and they went through every project or assignment DD had while she learned to streamline her process. The AT specialist also works with each teacher to assure they know what DD's process needs to look like. Both DD and the teachers have been traIned in how she uses voice notes. (She records the classes, can type shorthand notes to bookmark certain areas, take photos of the notes on the whiteboard, etc.) It's all way, way over my head but DD is now totally independent. They meet in person maybe once a month and the AT specialist zooms into her classes or to discuss any problems she's encountering. This past spring DD copresented with her at a conference for teachers and administrators explaining how AT makes her education possible.
This is such an amazing high note to this story, I am so glad to read it. And wish we could find our own such expert!
Interestingly DD LOVES to write. She writes stories, songs, scripts. Whenever she has free time she writes. However the problems she experienced with the glitchy iPad a few years ago makes her reluctant to use voice to text even though it is MUCH faster when it works. She insists on typing everything which is a longer, harder process and her dyslexia means there are tons of spelling errors. She has some programs that allow her to move between keyboarding and voice recording it she gets really stuck on a word.
This is one of the many parts of your post that really emphasize the importance of AT being well supported and issues immediately addressed so there can be trust for the user.
I'm not sure if this helps or if you are looking for more specifics about what programs and apps DD is using. If so maybe provide a specific list of tasks and I'll find out what DD is using. (ie a worksheet that can't be done by hand can be photographed, filled out on an iPad and printed, emailed or shared by Google) The only thing they haven't come up with a workaround for (other than scribing) is handwritten group activities like "foldover stories" in a creative writing class.
HTH
It has really helped, I would be really interested in how specifically she does math. I think questions about other areas of learning or types of tasks will come as we get going.
What I had hoped to get an impression of from asking these questions was partly what sort of device would be most useful to her at the moment (ie laptop because typing is most important or ipad because video, photos, voice to text and using a pencil are more important). And between other research I have been doing and thinking through all of your posts I am getting clearer on that decision.
