What do you think of when you see the words “reading” and “technology” in the same sentence? I tend to think of e-book readers and how easy it is to transfer stuff to, and then read, on my phone. But there is more to it than that. According to Dyslexia Action, around one in ten students struggle to read standard print.
Heard any good books lately?
When it comes to “personalised learning”, which has been the mantra of the educational world for as long as I can remember, paper books offer the least personalised experience of all.Typewriters? No thanks!
There is something romantic about an old manual typewriter. The clattering of the keys sounds somewhat industrial, which connotes “industrious”. Bashing away at a typewriter is what real writers do. No spellchecker, no thesaurus, no internet, and no forgiveness if you make a mistake. So typing something that looked reasonable, and which didn’t involve too much correction fluid, gave one a sense of achievement.
Collabor8 4 Change in Inclusive Technologies
I’ve just received the schedule for this free conference, which I wrote about in Learning about inclusive technologies through collaboration, and it looks pretty good. It takes place this evening, so here is a quick heads-up about it.
Read MoreHidden treasures
We’ve probably all heard the statistic that 80% of people use only 20% of a program’s features – but that doesn’t mean to say that the unused features are no good. It could be that people haven’t discovered them, or could not find an obvious use for them, or that they have simply forgotten about them.
Putting dyslexia first with technology
One of the things that it is all too easy to forget is that if a child is ‘playing up’ in class, it could be a disability issue rather than a behavioural one. I have known that for a long time, but attending a Technology for Print Disabilities Training Day served as a useful reminder. That training day, just to put this article in context, was run by Load2Learn, a partnership venture between Dyslexia Action and the RNIB.
Learning about inclusive technologies through collaboration
There are all different ways of running a training day. One approach is to beat delegates into submission by talking at them all day long. Another is to get them to do something. Learning by doing is a well-known approach, having been perfected, I believe, in the Neanderthal era. In short, it has a good track record, and was the method of choice adopted by Load2Learn for their Technologies for Print Disabilities Training Day.
Review of the Technology for Print Disabilities Training Day
When I was invited to attend the Technology for Print Disabilities training day, run by Dyslexia Action, I was filled with a sense of dread. True, it was free. But I’d have to leave the house at the crack of dawn, travel a couple of hundred miles, return well into the evening – and all for a topic which I assumed had only a tangential relevance to my day-to-day work. Nevertheless, applying the deep philosophical outlook I learnt listening to Fats Waller (“One never knows, do one?”), I said to myself, “OK, let’s give it a whirl.”