Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Assistive technology recommendations?

Looking for recommendations re: assistive technology for dyslexia and dysgraphia. What works well for your children?

So far, DD10 does well with typing her work and using Ginger software for editing. She reads quite well, considering her issues, but she admits that she skips the words she does not know and it keeps her from understanding a lot of what she reads. We have encouraged her to use dictionaries, etc but this takes too long. There are few books that interest her available for e-readers. We have been thinking about purchasing a Reading Pen to assist her. Has anyone tried one?

She loves to use our iPad. It would be great to find ways to use it for maximum benefit for her. Any suggestions are welcome!

I'd think a speech-to-text dictionary on the iPad may help a bunch.

k's mum, I'm on my way out at the moment but will be back later and fill you in on the AT our dysgraphic ds12 uses - he's switched over almost completely to the iPad this year and it's going well. Do you have an iPad 1, 2, or 3?

I'm curious about the "Reading Pen" - can you tell us what that is? My youngest dd isn't dyslexic but has a challenge with visual associative memory and I'm wondering if it's something that might be useful for her.

polarbear

We have an iPad 3.

Here is a link to the reading pen: http://www.wizcomtech.com/eng/catalog/a/readingpen2/

She reads all day long, in the car, on the bus, in the tub, during math class, etc. she always has a book in her hand. But, she acknowledges that she skips the words she doesn't know. The problem is that she wants to read difficult books, which are full of unfamiliar words. She has a fantastic ability to memorize the picture of a word, once she can say it out loud. I thought this pen could help give her independence and allow her to add new words to her vocabulary.

We are waiting until middle school to get her a laptop. Hoping we can have her using an iPad instead. It seems to have more options for kids with learning challenges.

My dd is using Dragon SPeak Naturally, ToonTastic (for story telling), evernote(for note taking and recording minilessons), and a few other apps that I can't recall. She is getting better and better with practice using dragon speak and she uses reading ally to download books for listening while she follows along with the book. She is dyslexic and dysgraphic. It gives her independence with homework...and I LOVE that. She is so much happier when she can do all her own work without help.

She has the reading pen, but gets frustrated because it tends to only read a certain size font and only on black and white pages.

I am SO excited to be reading all these posts! We are awaiting DD7's AT eval which should hopefully happen any day. She was recently given a para to help with scribing, reading instructions, giving her oral spelling tests, etc. She is using an old fashioned tape recorder and books on tape for enrichment breaks to listen to high level texts since no one could figure out an ebook option. We bought Dragon over the summer and got her a desktop last year so she could start to get comfortable with keyboarding. She gets easily frustrated, though. Fine motor and visual perception issues combine with her dyslexia and dysgraphia to make this all seem overwhelming - especially to someone as non-techy as me. Would an iPad be worth considering for a second grader? Anything else I should specifically ask for as part of the AT eval?

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

This reply is about my dd8 who reads via audio and is challenged with visual reading. She has a Kindle, which she likes and she listens to audiobooks on it - although I am not fond of having to buy a ton of audiobooks She will also listen to books on my iPad 1, and she's ok with it although she prefers the voices on true audiobooks over the iPad computer voice. The nice thing about the iPad is you can find quite a few classic books at very low cost.

I've thought about signing her up for Learning Ally - www.learningally.org, but haven't actually done it yet.

I'm very interested in what others suggest, as we're still trying to find solutions for her

polarbear

Mamabear - is it called "reading ally" or "learning ally?" I found "learning ally" but can't find one called "reading ally" and just want to make sure I got the right one. Thanks!

I just read Pemberley's post and have a few thoughts for you Pemb

One thing that I think might be useful in an iPad for a 2nd grader is the size of the keyboard when she's learning to type. DS uses a bluetooth keyboard for most of his iPad work, and it's smaller than a regular sized laptop keyboard (or at least it looks smaller!).. so it might be easier for a young child with small hands.

We were also told when ds started to learn to type (summer after 2nd grade) that it was best to let him come up with his own set of fingering rather than trying to master traditional touch typing. A lot of kids use just their thumb and first finger to type with. Our ds didn't go for that - the software shows the traditional fingering and ds is kind of a stickler for following directions so he learned traditional typing. Once ds learned to type our dds wanted to learn too, so we had all of them go through the BBS Mat Typing course online, and it was a great intro for them. We also have UltraKey for further practice, but I've heard good things about Mavis Beacon too. The great thing about BBS is that it's highly kid-oriented with noise and graphics etc I also think it's free but don't remember for sure.

One thing I'd watch for if she has fine motor issues (my ds12 also has fine motor challenges) - typing may not be the hugely successful answer to all your dd's dysgraphic challenges. Although my ds types faster than he writes, he still types very slowly relative to other children and simply learning to type didn't enable him to be productive enough at written expression to be successful at school. Voice-to-text is the AT that he's most successful at re writing. Before he had access to voice-to-text on his iPad I still did a lot of scribing for him on longer writing assignments.

polarbear