I'm back! Thanks for the link to the Reading Pen
My first notes are in reference to my ds12, and he's dysgraphic but not dyslexic, so he isn't using any AT specific to reading, although he does read books on his iPad. We've noticed good things and not-so-great things about reading on the iPad for kids who *don't* need audiobooks. We like the convenience - since he's using the iPad for school, it's easier to have his books on the iPad and not have to have a book left behind at either home or school when he's in the other place. The downside is we don't let him take the iPad to bed, and he likes to read himself to sleep at night... so he's lost that comfort thing when he's reading a book on the iPad plus... I noticed he doesn't read books as quickly as he does when he takes them to bed and reads instead of sleeping lol.
For dysgraphia, he was using a laptop in school up until this year. He wasn't terribly successful using Dragon on the laptop (although he wanted to use it). He had word prediction software but also didn't like to use it because it disabled the arrow keys that are usually used to move the cursor around with, and he found that very inconvenient. When he did use his word prediction software (Co:Writer) it made a huge difference in the quality of his spelling/punctuation etc and the overall quality of his writing was better. He used Efofex for math, mostly the graphing package. He has a Live Scribe pen for note-taking which was the default note-taking plan when he was using the laptop... but he never really used it but instead was able to rely on his memory (which is incredible).
This year all the kids in his grade are using iPads for school, so he's had to switch, and it's actually working out great. He has an iPad 3, but really the only thing that he's using on the iPad 3 that's not available on an iPad 1 is the camera. He uses the camera to take pictures of the daily homework assignments (which are written on the board and which he has a terrible time trying to copy by hand or by typing). He also uses the camera to "scan" documents to pdf (uses the "JotNot" app). It's quick and easy. He types on his pdf files in an app that I think is called "Type on PDF" - I can't remember for sure, and his iPad is at school at the moment
What's really made a huge impact though is voice-to-text on the iPad - as long as he has internet access it works *really* really well for him. He started with Dragon but then realized that there is a built-in voice-to-text that works just as well (it's accessed via the key that has a microphone picture on the iPad keyboard). The downside to using Dragon is you have to "write" in Dragon and then send the text to whatever final doc you want it in - not a huge step but an extra step. He's able to use the iPad built-in voice-to-text in all of his apps that he uses for school so he bypasses having to move text around. Using voice-to-text also for the most part entirely eliminates the step of spell-correcting his work, which is huge for him because his spelling really breaks down while writing. He can spell well, but it takes a long time to go back through a document he's completely written and correct all the misspellings as well as missed capital letters and missed punctuation. He's also able to simply get his ideas out faster with voice-to-text, which is HUGE
For him
FWIW, we didn't buy an iPad with Gs... the kids at ds school have wireless access there, and we've got wifi at home.
DS also has Evernote - we'd read good reviews about it for notetaking and it looks great. He's played around with the recording option a little bit, but he still hasn't practiced taking notes at school yet. That's on our list but he hasn't gotten to it yet. He's in 7th grade this year and in English they have just started getting instruction on taking notes as part of their curriculum... and the teacher made him take notes with handwriting (picture me banging my head into the wall)... because... he thought I would want him to have the extra practice... argh.. anyway, we have that cleared up now and possibly within the next few months we'll have some feedback on his note-taking experiences on the iPad
He's using the iCal calendar for scheduling.
The only other thing I can think of re dysgraphia and the iPad is that ds seems to be able to manipulate the spell-correct easier than using spell-check in MSWord (laptop) - but his challenge isn't spelling, it's spelling-while-writing, so he can recognize words that are misspelled. I think it would be more difficult to use for a child who doesn't know how to spell.
There are word-prediction options for the iPad too - ds isn't using them though so I can't remember the names of what we looked at. I do remember that what we looked at seemed to be more geared toward dyslexic+dysgraphic students... so there may be something out there that would work well for your dd
polarbear
