Becoming Independent: KTC Students Use Assistive Technology to Break Down Barriers to their Learning

At KTC, many of our students come in with some sort of deficit.  The deficit that makes it hard for most kids to participate in my class is the lack of reading ability or reading skills and the the lack of fine motor skills or writing ability.

In traditional classrooms, these students need the help of someone who would read for this student. In my class, we are using technology to help the students overcome these obstacles by using text to speech and voice to text options on the computer.

Both of these functions are available with Google.  Google offers the Chrome Web Store which provides you with the ability to download numerous tools to help your students.  The one extension we downloaded was called SpeakIt! and will allow students to highlight text in a website (including Moodle) and have it read to them.  After it is downloaded to the student's Google account, it shows up in the far right corner of their web address bar.

Something else that is extremely useful for our students is the voice to text option that is now free with any Google account.  In a Google Doc, under tools, you will find the option of voice typing.  With this feature, you can click to use your microphone on your computer, speak into your computer, and the words you're saying appear on the screen.

Using Google has definitely helped my teaching and has helped my students both learn and become independent.