Transcript
"What age should I start my child on assistive technology?" is the common question that I often hear. And really I use the marker of frustration. When a student starts to show frustration around an academic skill such as reading, writing, numeracy, then it's a great time to start to bring technology in. For young children, kindergarten, grade one, when we start introducing the technology we do it in parallel to remediation. So we're still teaching the student how to learn how to read, write or spell and we're bringing technology in to allow them to have access to the curriculum, to allow them to do the same types of work that their peers are doing in the class.
As well as we want them to have the joy of knowing how to read, of how to send a message to their friend. So we want to bring the technology in early so that we start to allow the student to not become frustrated with the work that they're doing, allow them to have access to the curriculum. When you start assistive technology and remediation at the same time, over time when you continue down both paths, remediation really strengthens that skill but the technology magnifies the performance of that skill many times over. So after two to three years of doing both of these, we see the student's performance level be significantly higher than it probably would have been if we had not introduced technology at the same time as we started doing remediation.
