(Since this is the last piece of essential work in this course, I wanted to apply knowledge from all 4 weeks in this work, though not necessarily in the order presented in the course).

Having worked with disabled/less-abled students for 9 years, I have had the opportunity to come across different learning disabilities and assistive technologies. I worked with visually impaired students, blind students, students with varying levels of mental illnesses (Dyslexia, Asperger, etc.), as well as, with students with mobility problems.

here, I would like to refer to 2 students in particular: one blind by birth (Student A) and another a wheelchair user with severe mobility problems following an accident (Student B). Some of the assistive technologies I was able to help these students with include:

• Screen readers – JAWS (Student A) - easy to use
• Braille and braille embossers (Student A) - quite heavy
• Tactile keyboards (Student A) - easy to use
• Text-to-Voice and voice-to-text software (Student A)- easy to use
• Digital pens (Student A) - easy to use
• Audio Players and Recorders (Student A and B) - easy to use
• Camcorders (Student B) - very tricky to use sometimes
• Tactile pads (Student A) - has to be adapted

(There is a wider range of assistive technologies out there).

I would like to refer to Part 3 – Multimodal Learning. From my own experience, I was able to observe that disabled students often use several modes of learning combined together. Student A, who was blind by birth, particularly relied on her auditory senses.  She quickly picked up everything that was said in the classroom and was typing it on her braille machine or laptop. She also had an audio recorder/player. The fact that she was very attentive in class, was immediately typing her understanding and could listen to the recording, gave her an added advantage over the other students. Needless to say, she performed much better than most of her peers throughout her university studies.

Students with learning disabilities are often assessed, not on memorising concepts, but on their application concepts.  Student A, who was blind, was enrolled in an engineering course. Lab materials were adapted for her, so that she could use tactile pads to interact with circuit diagrams.

Here I would like to refer to Student B.  Given that Student B was bound to a wheel chair and needed constant care round the clock, he often could not attend some classes and watched recordings of the lecture. Special arrangements were made to have someone recording the lecture for him. Unfortunately none of the lecturers took the initiative to edit the video and make it accessible to the other students.

Student B relied a lot on collaborative intelligence (Part 5 - Collaborative intelligence), participating in forums on BlackBoard and attending group discussions and group work. Although due to his own constraints, Student B was mostly an individual learner, he excelled in group work. The most interesting observation that I made was the fact that he has not heard concepts directly from the lecturer during the class, he was able to challenge and critically analyse concepts during group discussions and seminars and subsequently came up with new ideas (Part 6 – Critical Analysis).

This was more prominent during his last year’s project work which was a group effort, though reports had to written individually.  Although the group consisted of 5 members, he was the one whose suggestions were most viable and practical in terms of getting a robot to do cursive writing. In his report, he was able to critically back up the 2 implementations that were developed. He took the approach of a prosumer (Part 2 – Active Knowledge Making) and ubiquitous learning was really helpful in his case, resulting in a Frist Class.

Unfortunately, assistive technologies are perceived only as technologies that disabled students use. However, I would argue that even the other students can make use of it. Let’s consider a lecture theatre filled with 200-300 students, with the back row of students sitting almost 10 metres or more away from the lecturer. Although in most cases, there are mikes, this is not practical when the tutor walks to the board to write something and explain something at the same time, unless if there are facilities of wireless mikes. If students have access to recorders, they could place these on the tutor’s desk and listen back to the lecture during their own time. And what if LT is not well lit, or there are light contrasts on the board making certain colour markers practically impossible to see. What is these lectures were recorded and made accessible to students? In such a scenario, ubiquitous learning (Part 1 – Ubiquitous Learning) is most practical.

To conclude, I would like to share a short video, that is not related to assistive technologies, but instead adaptive tools. Perhaps, we should start to teach kids how to adapt their environment to make things more accessible, these skills might be handy later on, especially in schools and higher education.