AT Solutions at School
Laptop Makes the Difference
When our staff met Charlotte, she was in the second grade and just starting to fall behind the rest of her class. Charlotte has cerebral palsy and had trouble holding and controlling her pencil. Charlotte's school district wanted to hire an aide to act as a scribe for her -- but her mother suggested an assistive technology evaluation instead.
We recommended a laptop for Charlotte and installed some special programs, like word prediction software, to help her keep up. Charlotte learned to type and use a mouse.
Today Charlotte is in sixth grade and is an honor roll student. Not only did the laptop help her keep pace with her peers, it has helped her become tech-saavy student who will most likely be ahead of the curve in high school.
Ongoing Technical Support
As we support students who struggle meeting standards (NCLB, CCCS), often times a single Assistive Technology Evaluation is not be enough to fully meet their needs. Many times we recommend technology that is expensive and quite complicated – not the kind of tool you’d want dropped into your classroom without any support to go along with it.
A great example of a student who really benefited from ongoing support is Haley, a 10-year-old with multiple disabilities. Haley has a variety of technology tools provided to her, by the district, in order to meet her educational needs. Her team changed at the beginning of the school year and the new team members were unfamiliar with her technology. We provided weekly on-going support to Haley and her team. This support varied from week to week, from group training one week to assisting with developing modified curriculum the next.
As the team became more comfortable with the features of the technology tools and Haley’s abilities, we were able to reduce the visits accordingly. The ability to meet continually and customize the service to meet specific needs created a successful technology implementation.
An AT Support Services contract is a unique solution being implemented by some districts that addresses this situation. Consultants work with the teams on a weekly or monthly basis to ensure that the technology solution is the most appropriate for the student. In addition to providing trials on technology tools, the consultant can also conduct trainings for the student and the support team.
