Assistive Technology for Literacy or “crutch”

“Supportive assistive technology approaches should work symbiotically with learning interventions. In an ideal situation, students can use an assistive technology intervention to continually improve their reading skills while at the same time taking advantage of reading support to provide the scaffolding necessary to read text at their grade level” (Hasselbring & Bausch, p. 73).

With any assistive tech. you have to distill the individuals gains from the weight carried by a piece of assistive tech. Let’s just break it down to a medical metaphor. Sometimes when an individual is sick and can’t support themselves independently, a doctor will induce a coma so that machines can run the person’s vital organs for a while. The plus is that the person stays alive and whatever part is overworked gets to rest and recover on machines. The drawback is that for every one day that a person is in an induced coma, the recovery time is 5 days times that. So if someone is in a coma for a week, it will then take them roughly a month to recover once brought back out of that coma.

As long as the technology can be orchestrated in a “symbiotic” fashion, where the individual is carrying its weight in growing in areas to compensate for the assistance in one, then overall positives will emerge. If the trend becomes that the assistive tech. piece is just keeping someone from sinking or becoming an academic crutch, that may actually impede the progress of that person intellectually and even physically.

To reference the case from my previous journal entry Assistive Tech. Specialists, Case In Point, the physical therapist was quite hesitant in rolling out any voice rec. software for this student because she figured the student's condition might get worse if he did not use his muscles as much as possible. In this case the physical therapist and tech. specialist, and of course the student using assistive tech. must have a serious conversation about the long-term pros and cons of such assistance.