Assessing Student's Needs for Assistive Technology (ASNAT)

Chapter 5 – Assistive Technology for Reading, Studying, and Math
• My Own Bookshelf (Softtouch Software) A program that allows the teacher to create, store books
on personalized bookshelf, and select books for students to read. It collects data on each child’s
reading experience. Students are able to select books from their own bookshelf and read them as
often as they wish.
There are many others available also, including releases by nearly every major publisher of elementary
reading series. If you would like to know names of more electronic books you can visit the website of
Project LITT: Literacy Instruction through Technology which conducted a three year study of the
effectiveness of hypermedia based children's literature in improving reading skills of students with
learning disabilities. http://edweb.sdsu.edu/SPED/ProjectLITT/LITT
In addition, texts that were written more than 50 years ago are now in the public domain and can be
downloaded from the Internet by going to the Project Gutenberg site. These wonderful stories and
novels can be adapted for use with older students who are still struggling with reading but would enjoy a
more complex story line. These texts are available from http://www.promo.net/pg/
Working with Words
Because lots of reading and writing are crucial for the development of decoding and spelling skills, it is
crucial that children have a lot of experiences working with words. Analogic phonics are critical to the
processes of reading and writing. We must teach students what to do when they encounter a word they
do not know. There are many instructional strategies that can be used to increase student's experience
with words. Two of them are the Word Wall and Making Words.
Word Walls can be used for more than one purpose and a classroom may have more than one word wall
on display. One type of Word Wall contains only words to be decoded or "sounded out" by analogies.
This is based upon the Benchmark Program (Downer, 1986). Because the words are always visible, the
student can say to himself "if a-n-d is 'and', then h-a-n-d is 'hand'". During spelling tests, students can
look at the word wall as a resource so that they do not practice the wrong spelling of words. During
instruction the teacher will use the words to make sentences, do word sorts, review rhymes and endings
and clap and chant the letters as words are reviewed or added to the wall. Students who are not able to
speak can participate with recorded messages on a voice output communication device. Students can
also use a spinner activated with a switch to contribute rhyming words to the class discussion.
Another Word Wall might contain curriculum-based vocabulary (i.e., carbon dioxide, community,
addend, etc.). During class the teacher instructs the students in a vocabulary lesson, uses the word in
context of the subject area, and adds the word to the Word Wall (often color coded, e.g. green for
science, pink for language arts, orange for math, etc.). Four or five new words can be added to the wall
each week. They are placed in alphabetic order and shape and color cues are added to highlight
differences between words and help students remember which words are which. Making Words is
another part of Working with Words. It is a multilevel, developmental spelling activity focused on
discovering how the alphabet system works. It is based on spelling patterns and word family instruction.
The teacher gives students six to eight individual letters (on cards, magnets, tiles, etc.) that make up a
single target vocabulary word. Then the students study and rearrange letters to create smaller one-, two-,
three-, and four-letter words. The selection of words is systematic and intended to highlight the
relationship between the words and word parts. Making words is similar to the game of making as many
small words out of a larger word as possible (e.g. spring includes sing, ring, rings, pin, pins, grin, grins,
etc.).
Assessing Students’ Needs for Assistive Technology (2004) 127