Enormous diversity in the classrooms can sometimes create problems for the teachers. Reaching room full of students whose skills may differ broadly can be an enormous challenge.
Fortunately, one of the astonishing things about technology is that it can perform some of the work to link the gap between students. There are a ton of wonderful technologies out there which assist students who are hearing, visually, or physically impaired. Unluckily, many of such technologies come with the huge price tag – which schools or districts may not always be able to give.
Fortunately, the more extensive (education and non-education identical) market has seen development of many new technologies which can be utilized as assistive technologies in the classroom, and many of them are low-cost or even free. Many of them can even be utilized in online also traditional classrooms. Here is list of a few of our favourites for you to check out!
Video Magnifiers
Online courses and video material offers the challenge for students with low vision, but tools like these video magnifiers allow these students to read their course materials, study materials, and other web-based information more effortlessly. Some of these fall on more costly end of the scale, but there are in general a extremely wide variety of kinds and price points available to suit each student’s requirements.
Adaptive Mousing
There are a number of diverse adaptive mousing tools out there to help those who are mobility damaged. As most mouse actions can be simply carried out with keyboard shortcuts, those can also be difficult or not possible for someone who is mobility impaired. Tools like Face Mouse and EPOC from Emotiv permit users to control computers by using facial expressions and head movements in its place of mouse movements and keyboard strokes. Not only very useful for those who actually require it, but the really cool technology to check out just because.
Closed Captioning & Subtitling
For hearing impaired students, courses which heavily depend on audio/video multimedia can be hard. Services like those presented by CPC (like you frequently see on TV) allow these students to watch and ‘listen’ to same video material as their peers. Useful for conventional classes, but remarkably helpful to hearing impaired students in online courses. Students can simply participate in video lectures and make their own videos with subtitles or closed captioning.
Screen Readers
Screen readers are software programs which permit blind and visually impaired users to read text on the computer screen by means of the use of a speech synthesizer. American Foundation for the Blind states that these kinds of devices which present speech output make work more productive for blind and visually impaired users than attempting to struggle through reading text on screen. The AFB presents what appears to be pretty comprehensive list of product options, ranging in price from approximately $250-$1500.
Word Talk
Word Talk is the free text-to-speech plugin for Microsoft Word which makes audio files from any document written in Word. It can speak text of document and highlight as it goes, allowing visually impaired users to read documents online. It also presents a number of programmable keyboard shortcuts, helping many kinds of users (for instance, students who have trouble holding the mouse) to have the adapted, useful device. It is also great for students with reading difficulties, who may advantage from both reading and hearing the text they are working with.
People with reading and writing problems, having text reinforced by hearing it read out loud can be very helpful. Expert programs have existed to do this for extended time, and in several cases are very helpful and highly suitable and must be seriously considered, maybe in consultation with professional recommendation where essential.
It speaks the text of the Word document, Highlights the text as it goes, select to Speak the whole document, paragraph, sentence or just the word, talking dictionary to aid decide which word spelling is most suitable; modify the voice and speed of the speech.