I start this week by acknowledging that this topic was the steepest learning curve for me in EC&I 833. I realized as soon as the other group began presenting that I really had no prior knowledge or experiences with assistive technology. As I have mentioned in previous posts, the school I teach in is technologically fairly poor, and I have had little to do with assistive technologies. 

The article, Rethinking Assistive Technology by Dave L. Edyburn, Ph.D is a good starting point for understanding the basics of assistive technology, as it begins by defining key terms and ideas that are important. I particularly liked the graphic below, which “dissects” a commonly used definition of an assistive technology device.

There are a few things from this graphic that stands out to me- “An AT device is anything”- this reminded me of a post Launel shared on Google+, in which her husband’s cousin creates tools to allow him to be successful as a machinist. I wouldn’t necessarily had thought of that as assistive technology before. The article also specifies that AT must help a child stay the same, get a little better, or help them to get a lot better. I think this is really important when we consider that AT must serve a purpose, and not just be another educational buzzword. We are far too willing to jump on technology bandwagons without thoroughly considering the purpose. 

Looking at assistive technology as a whole was too big a concept to tackle in a single blog post, so I decided to focus my efforts on an AT that was of interest to me. As a middle-years ELA teacher, I was interested in learning more about the AT Ginger, which I first read about on Teach Thought. My goal this week was to learn more about this program, and to see if I could justify recommending it to some of my students and possibly my administration team (the big downside: it is not a free program).

Ginger is an app that has several features that can help students who have difficulty writing (which in my experience is a surprising number). Ginger can help students who have dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyspraxia, and other learning disorders with writing. It is also designed for speakers of languages other than English, which is a huge benefit in a province with increasing numbers of EAL students.

Ginger has 6 main features:

1. Grammar checker: this feature doesn’t sound like anything new, but in addition to finding obvious errors, Ginger can also recognize  commonly misused words like “there,” “their” or “they’re” and “to”, “two”, “too”.
2. Sentence rephraser: this is one of my favorite features, it’s tagline being “express yourself in better ways“, where students can enter their original thoughts and the program will help them tweek it
3. Translation: 40 different languages
4. Dictionary with contextual definitions and synonyms
5. Text reader: text to speech tool
6. Personal Trainer: unique to each student, it helps them to learn from their own individual mistakes

After learning more about Ginger, I have decided to speak to a number of my students and parents about the potential of getting it set up on their devices. I can see the potential for enormous benefit in their confidence, and the quality of their written work. The disadvantages I see are the financial cost, and the availability of the technology to run the program.

I am extremely interested to know if anyone has had experience with Ginger- please share!