I am hoping to brainstorm note taking ideas that have worked for your kids with dysgraphia or other writing issues. We are now in the 6th week of 6th grade and the issue has come up several times already. I assume this means that we have entered a new phase of DD's education and we need to address this now as the skill becomes more and more needed.
So far we have encountered the questions when
1. Conducting first person research or taking notes in real time when someone is speaking to her. ie While interviewing members if a Native American tribe at a living history museum for a school project DD had to focus 100% on the person she was speaking to. No chance for her to take notes. It's not realistic for her to write (or even type) notes in real time. She feels voice notes would be distracting for both her and the person she is speaking to so DH stood behind her writing down what he thought might be most important. Her auditory memory is freakishly good so she remembered just about everything the next day (after 7 hours at the museum - lots and lots of detail) when she put together her PowerPoint and only needed his notes for a few Native American words. I'm not sure she would have remembered in such great detail had she needed to put the presentation together a few days, weeks or months later.
She will likely need this same real-time note taking skill as she moves to upper level classes. Recording entire classes to go back through later to make notes not only would double her work load but due to snails pace processing speed be incredibly time consuming. There has to be a better solution.
I'm also concerned that once someone says something she knows is important she can't rewind time in order to record it. If she doesn't catch it as the person says it how does save it? And of course in some states it's illegal to record someone speaking without their permission. How do you work around that?
2. She is working on a year long project for her TAG program so will be compiling information from many sources for the next few months. She works primarily in CoWriter so for internet research she can copy and paste directly on her iPad. For books loaded on her iPad in VoiceDream she can make notes right in the book on the iPad, which I assume she can then copy and paste into CoWriter. But how does she work with real, old fashioned ink and paper books? She can't highlight a library book but could use sticky notes to mark pages. The slow processing speed and dyslexia combine with the dysgraphia to make copying info from a written source slow and error prone, though. She can do it but I'm wondering if any of your kids have come up with a system that make their lives easier?
I have heard of a "smart pen" but don't really understand it. And DD really can't write much by hand so I'm not sure how useful it would be for her. I spoke to the AT specialist and she said there are ways of recording a lecture/conversation/interview, etc and marking parts of it so you can revisit the portion you need rather than listening to the whole thing. Has anyone worked with this technology? Any input to share?
What has worked for your kids? What hasn't? What do you wish you knew earlier? Tried earlier? Gave up on earlier? What other situations do we have to be prepared to work around?
I am totally non technical so I may not understand all your answers but hopefully they will give me a place to start with all my questions. TIA
