Day 3: Adoption or Abandonment

"Assistive technologies are used when consumers see the devices as valuable to their goal achievement."

(Marcia J. Scherer in Chapter 8 of Living in the State of Stuck)

Today I got my hands on an iPad and an iTouch, both for the first time. No wonder those devices are so pupolar right now. Now wonder that eBook readers have slashed their prices, because this is the stuff of fun and accessibility and increased communications ability.

Barb told us today that the influence of cosmesis - how a student looks when they are using assistive technology - is an important consideration for encouraging adoption of any assistive technology. Well, it is cool for anyone to have an iTouch, and I want one, too (despite my artifact age)!

I was impresed how easy it was to get the iTouch up and running and on the WWW. The touch screen selection of icons is truly intuitive. For me, not so much the sliding action since I want to slide right-to-left like turning a print page, not left to right to "go forward". At first, the size of the screen deterred me, but when my teammate Carolyn showed me how to pinch and grow on the screen, then I was reassured. It didn't take much explaining (and it sure didn't take a step-by-step manual) to start using the device with relative ease.

Then we had an exploration of Proloquo2Go. It is an amazing commercial text-to-speech app (approximate cost is US$190, or about CAN$200 + shipping and taxes) that you can get right from iTunes. Now, either you need a knowledgeable in-person tutor, like we had in class with Barb Welsford, or you need to refer to the pdf manual. As good as the manual is, my personal learning style leans strongly to the in-person tutorial, the just-in-time and practical learning experiences. And we're going to get more of those tomorrow. Yea!

Here are some video tutorials from the Proloquo website that I used to get a sense of the device and the app in use, but I noted the warning that the videos need to be updated to the most recently available version. There are more pdf format tutorials here.

So, my list of personally encountered communication formats now needs to expand to include these high tech tools. I am amazed by their potential, and I just know that there will be more ideas and triggers tomorrow.

The topic of assessment was also a focus today.

WATI (the Wisconsin Assistive Technology Iniative) has published many resources online and I have added a link to those resources in the Evolving Links Listing to the left. (Click here for a sample of how a school district took the WATI information and tailored it to their SSS programming.) We will start with these as our assessment foundation tomorrow when Barb distributes the case studies for our assignment. It will be so good to apply theory and personal learning to the practicalities of helping a student.


SETT (the Student Environment Tasks Tools framework) by Joy Zabala has also published many online resources and that link is also posted to the Evolving Links Listing