Transcript

One of the worries about bringing technology to a whole classroom is that for some students who need it, they're going to benefit from it, but for the students who don't need it, it's going to impair them or that it's going to increase their functioning and it's going to be a form of cheating. But what we've actually found is that when we do full classroom-wide interventions with the technology, is that students actually only use the tools that are beneficial for them. So if I'm a proficient reader, I'm not going to have the computer read out loud to me because in fact the computer's going to read slower than my natural abilities are and that's going to be frustrating. So I'm not going to really use that feature. However, I might use the feature that allows me to highlight important information and allow the computer to extract that because we know that highlighting and making notes is a good skill that everybody benefits from. 

It allows us to enhance skills that otherwise we would be slowed down because we are using pencil and paper. Assistive technology is just going to become more and more common educational software that all students will have access to and students will pick and choose from the tools available to them and choose the tools that are best going to serve them to get their work done faster.