Assistive Technology and Curriculum Alignment for students with visual disabilities
Last week some colleagues and I gave an informative presentation at ATIA in Orlando on the alignment of a technology curriculum with assistive technology for a PreK-12 school environment. The value of this approach is that students are taught a standard educational technology curriculum while being exposed to the concurrent assistive technology skills necessary to complete the standard educational technology curriculum.
The process of adding the assistive technology components on top of the standard technology curriculum require a multidisciplinary team made up of both assistive technology specialists, content curriculum experts, curriculum specialists, and teachers. The approach also requires buy-in by all the groups previously mentioned, as well as institutional administration, principals and support staff. Once a scope and sequence of assistive technology skills are matched with a standard set of technology skills defined in an educational technology curriculum, then the teachers and staff responsible for direct student instruction will require the necessary assistive technology training. There are several formats and structures to ensure that staff obtain the appropriate prerequisite assistive technology skills. These include, online learning modules, in-person trainings, conference attendance, learning communities and technology mentoring programs.
Institutional administration can ensure compliance by raising the expectation of technology inclusion in lesson plans and other content area curriculums. Numerous educational standards mandate implementation of increased use of technology by students in the classroom in a K-12 environment. Concepts of universal Design Learning also impact the alignment of assistive technologies with an educational technology curriculum. The set of assistive technology skills will depend on the primary media navigation by each individual student based on the impact of their visual disability on their ability to use technology. A student with low vision will learn to interact with a standard technology curriculum by learning concepts related to managing screen enlargement, color combinations, tracking the mouse pointer and system cursor and recognizing the impact of strain on the eyes. The student who is profoundly affected by their visual disability who depend on a screen reader, will learn concepts related to navigating with a screen reader, listening to synthesized speech, standard keyboard commands and gestures, augmenting technology use with refreshable Braille displays and understanding how those assistive technologies interact with applications, platforms and interfaces.
The most advantageous time to start developing these skills is in kinder garden, even if those skills are related to preliteracy skills with a focus on an understanding of development of early skills for the eventual use of technology and techno-literacy. At this age, students are still shaping their understanding of the world and have not developed any negative associations with technology and if this process is started early enough, the student will be accustomed to accessing and using technology in later grades.
Several institutions have developed and made publically available their scope and sequence for aligning assistive technology skills and technology curriculum skills. While these documents can be a good starting point for institution serving students with visual disabilities, each institution should customize these documents to align with their standard technology curriculum. The concept of aligning assistive technology skills with a standard technology curriculum requires reframing accountability institution-wide and raising the expectation for at a minimum ensuring that teachers and support staff are in a position to enhance the student's learning of assistive technology skills along with the inclusion of technology skills in the curriculum of content areas. If an institution develops a framework to align these concepts, as students advance from grade level to grade level, incrementally building their assistive technology skills, the student with a visual disability will find the process of learning technology skills easier. These students will not consider their assistive technology solutions as something extra they have to learn because the assistive technology has always been a part of interacting with mainstream technology for them. Because the concepts are aligned, this should pose less challenges for the student. The primary role of the Assistive Technology Specialist or Assistive Technology Team is to ensure that teachers and support staff have the opportunity for training and to assist with complicated cases where the expertise of the classroom teacher might not be sufficient to allow the student to advance along with the rest of the students in that grade level. Finally, data should be collected regularly to ensure that assistive technology and technology curriculums are aligned and that positive results are achieved.
