Early Childhood Special Education and Assistive Technology Blog

By: Katie McCormack,  EC-SEAT project scholar The iPad offers several tools to help children who struggle in academic learning areas. In general, barriers that prevent children from fully accessing and participating in academic learning include vision and hearing loss, inability to attend and focus and difficulties with motor functioning. These barriers make it difficult for children to access academic content at the same level of their peers without special needs. The iPad is an equalizer, a tool that allows many children with special needs to access academic content that they otherwise could not. For example, several accessibility features on the iPad, including VoiceOver, Zoom, Speech, Larger and Bold Text, Reduce Motion and Guided Access can help children with vision impairments to access academic content. There are also several apps specifically intended to help individuals with vision loss that help enlarge content, utilize speech and accommodate visual needs. The iPad al...

Written by: Maggierose Smith , EC-SEAT scholar and interning graduate student           Working in the classroom environment, I often do not see the families of the children as a majority of the students ride the bus in and out of school. To update the families on what their child was working on and experiencing in school, I wrote general newsletters to families.  When beginning to work one-on-one with a student, I wanted the skills to be practiced at home as well as in school. The child often spoke of his iPad at home including the apps he enjoyed using. I incorporated the iPad into his work at school, and found the child was extremely engaged during our time together and enjoyed many of the apps. Knowing the child had an iPad at home, I sent home a letter to parents featuring the Free apps we had been using in hopes they would add these to their iPad for the child to use in the home.  After receiving the l...