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Technology to Help with Learning Disabilities?
GotSanity asks: "I have a little brother who is now 18 and still can not read or do basic math. At an early age he was diagnosed with a level 10 mental handicap. I am curious as to what technology is available to help teach him to read. The major problems with most educational software I have found is that they both cater to younger minds (even though he has a learning disability he still is involved with everyday teenager activities like video games and music) and are often far to expensive for a working class family. I originally got him a copy of Typing of the Dead, and through it he has been learning to read and spell better. What novel education ideas can the Slashdot community suggest?"
Number Munchers. Nuff said.
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First, to the parent poster: Often, the issue isn't psychology but neurology. Besides, technology can solve some psychological problems (after all, a psychiatrist is a physician who applies pharmaceutical technologies to psychological problems).
To the submitter: I suspect you'd be better off talking to a support group of families with similar issues than the /. crowd. But failing that, you might try combining screen-reading software with level-appropriate reading that's also age appropriate (perhaps sports or gaming articles on websites), or try combining books on tape/audible with print copies of the same books.
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Certaintly he has a teacher or doctor that could explain his handicap to you and maybe they could explain how technology could help.
I agree with another poster who said that human interaction in a hands-on environment would probably be best. I'm sure you've already explored that route though and I doubt you're trying to circumvent that, but rather are trying to augment his learning.
Have you done any extensive googling? A search for "handicapped education technology disabled" might turn up alot. I did a search on those exact terms and ended up with
http://www.assis-tech.com/
Which I got off of this page here:
http://www.eskimo.com/~jlubin/disabled/all.htm
Perhaps some good searching is in order? Maybe you know about these things already. It wouldn't hurt to look around though.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
It will OCR the documents and then read it outloud, giving you help along the way. I gather it was designed with Special Ed teachers' advice.
Windows and Mac
Starts here http://gcompris.free.fr/ and works up, you may get here http://wims.unice.fr/wims/wims.cgi before you know it.
It doesn't require money. It does require a desire to help. You help your brother, you help others, others help you.
As a special education teacher, a home schooling mother with two learning-disabled children, and l/d adult married to another l/d adult, may I say that frankly there is not enough information to go on.
l essonview_en.htm, http://www.teachers.ash.org.au/jeather/maths/dicti onary.html, http://teachers.teach-nology.com/.
Every LD child (and LD adult) is different, every one of us has different needs and different learning styles. Does he learn better by hearing something, by seeing it, or by touch. In most cases the best bet is to mix all three.
Video games are an excellent resource for this and best bet is to find something he will actually do and then stick with it. Games that require basic reading and simple math skills are very helpful. (We found several Gamecube games work well for this as most do not "speak". Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing are good examples.)
I have found that there are a wide variety of free games on-line that aren't to "childish" but are helpful in reinforcing skills being worked on. A few are http://www.dositey.com/, http://www.internet4classrooms.com/index.htm, http://www.literacycenter.net/literacycenter_net/
The best relatively cheap learning software we have found, that is at least tolerable for adults (not too cutesy) are the http://www.helpme2learn.com/ "Help Me 2 Learn" programs. My husband and I have both used the Spanish software for ourselves and found it one of the few that eaither of us could really learn from. My kids love all the other software and we have found that the style it is taught works for all 3 children, who each have very different learning styles.
May I suggest checking out some home schooling websites, you will find many resources for a variety of learning disabilities and types.
There are many kinds of learning disability. A good diagnosis by someone clueful is really important. We took our child to a many doctors and educators. The best results came from a guy (Fred Gore) who runs a school for learning disabled kids in Waterloo, Ontario. He pretty much called how the condition would progress. He also gave us things that we could do. The result is that my child now reads at a college level. (he is in college.)
For the math I strongly recommend the work of John Mighton. Check his web site: www.jumptutoring.org It's a volunteer organization and the site is a bit messed up right now but it's worth the effort. His methods are really effective.
Turn on closed captioning for every TV in the house. Koskinen, et al (1986) had some good results with this. It wasn't dramatic, but there were some small improvements.
Koskinen, P.; Wilson, R. M.; Gambrell, L. B.; and Jensema, C. (1986). Using closed captioned television to enhance reading skills of learning disabled students. National Reading Conference Yearbook, 35, 61-65.
I have severe dyslexia and completely agree with the parent poster
I would add that it is very important to have someone who can diagnose and understands the learning problem(s). My Mom even became a school teacher because dyslexia runs in the family. I had all kinds of problems because I have dyslexia, but have always been able to figure things out. I started reading when I was three and one of the most traumatic times of my childhood was being accused of cheating repeatedly in the 4th grade because I could finish my reading assignments so quickly (and went through all of them to the highest reading level), but could not read out loud to save my life.
Besides my Mom of course, the single biggest help of all the programs, books, gizmos, and crap that the school system tried were two Tutors (one inside and one outside the school system). The one outside the school system actually understood dyslexia and within weeks I understood better how I learned, made better grades, and felt like less of a mutant. It was still hard work though, so no silver bullet.
And for anyone out there, take it with a grain of salt if they label you dyslexic. At the time I was growing up, they used to label everyone dyslexic from hyper kids to social misfits because it was a popular learning disability. Keep in mind that Einstein was dyslexic.
I went through all of the gimmicks and will vouch that a knowledgeable Tutor was the single greatest help. Look for them, they are well worth the effort.
You should take a look at this software by Jerry Pournelle's wife. http://www.readingtlc.com/
I've heard of a program that uses a bouncing ball along with a text-to-speech synth for dyslexic readers, and it seemed really helpful in teaching its users how to read. Training him to focus on things that make no sense at first is one key step.
It might not be so hard to design a simple tool that buffered text along with a synchronized bouncing ball and audio (the Festival library looks good). Eventually you could scale it to allow for hyperlinks to a visual dictionary. There must be software like this already given the rise of ADD diagnoses.
Also, I don't know if speech-to-text software works well enough these days but that might be another way - you could have members of your family record themselves reading and then the speech-to-text recognizer could display the words on the screen for him as he listens along.
"What sort of person wouldn't determine the word count *ahead of time*?"
Not only that, but what person who is writing software for touch typing would not know that a "word" used in calculating the wpm is in fact any five characters, including space and punctuations.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
Getting the word out and organizing a community around your project isn't always an easy thing. PR is as much a part of opensource as it is of any commercial product. I've had a couple fairly successful small projects and have yet to get more than a few minor bug fixes returned to me. It's really okay though because I never expected that much help. Unless you write a large project or agressively seek out help then you aren't likely to get it.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
You didn't specify what kind of learning disability your brother had. The most common kind of disability that affects reading is Dyslexia. It could also cause problems with math since if you don't perceive the digits and symbols in the same order they appear on the page, you are going to have trouble with math. Dyslexia is itself a rather vague diagnosis.
I can't really recommend specific software but I can share some observations from personal experience. Attitudes towards disability can make a huge difference. Expectations of failure can be self fulfilling prophacies.
A friend of mine was diagnosed as Dyslexic when he was young. His parents were told by doctors that he would never learn to read. Fortunately, his parents did not listen. They spent time tutoring him and enrolled him in a special school. My friend not only reads better than the vast majority of the population, he is extremely well read and has a Ph. D. in astrophysics.
I myself was diagnosed in high school as having dyslexia though that came as quite a surprise since I was reading at a 12th grade level in the 6th grade. When I was a kid, my mother read to me a lot.
Another friend has dyslexia. His parents took the attitute of steering him away from activities that he would be likely to fail at. As a result, he is functionally illiterate but slowly making progress on his own. It may have helped that I was able to counter some of the defeatist non-sense.
Your brother might benefit from using the English subtitles availible on most DVD players. As long as he tries to read them rather than just relying on the audio, the effect could be similar to being read to. He could choose content that was interesting to him. An interesting technological twist would be to modify an open source software DVD player such as Ogle to deliberately desynchronize the audio so the words would be spoken only after he had a chance to try and read them himself. Neurologically, being forced to make the attempt and then being corrected or reinforced immediately thereafter is important to the learning process. Of course, he may not be far enough along that he can follow the subtitles. He might be able to try to get the first word out of each subtitle, then work up to the first two words. It is important to be aware that sometimes the subtitles and the dialog do not match (subtitles having been copied from the script not transcribed from the actual performance) but they match often enough that if you take this into consideration it could be useful. Another variation would be to make the DVD player software automatically pause after each new subtitle is displayed.
Similarly, text to speech can be integrated with applications such as instant messaging and slight modification would create a delay between presenting the written words and speaking them. Of course, he would need to be litterate enough to be able to write something back in the case of instant messaging unless he is just lurking in some chat rooms. In the latter case, logs could be used so he doesn't have to keep up with the frantic pace in many chat rooms.
Dyslexic.com has some information on technological aids for dyslexia. Hierarchical Program Tree is a package listed at freshmeat that is intended for dyslexics. There is probably some more stuff out there.
I think there is a lot of potential for educational software that is designed to take particular learning disabilities into consideration that may not have been realized yet. As an example, a dyslexic may be able to make out the individual letters in a word but have difficulty perceiving them in the order they appear. So, "tea" and "ate" might be hard to distinguish. A program could sort through the dictionary finding words that are different morphologies of the same letters and speak a word and present similar words as a multiple choice test. Educational softw
Actually drugs wont help psychological problems at all (barring placebo effects).
If a patient suffers purly from a psychological illness/disorder then they have nothing wrong with their biochemistry and all drugs will do is provide some not so nice side effects.
If, of course, you were referring to mental illness, where there can be both psychological and biochemical problems, then yes, psychiatry can help through the use of drugs.
OK, nobody else has posted a serious response to this. The original poster was making a Dungeons and Dragons joke in poor taste. There is no such thing (AFAIK) as a "level n mental handicap". He's saying that his brother is highly mentally handicapped.
Writing your own would be reinventing the wheel. Go to http://www.jerrypournelle.com and check on Roberta Pournelle's reading program. It works, and the Pournelles are rather proud ofit.
If you're really serious about this, you should check out the software from Scientific Learning. One area where they've been very successful is with helping children with dyslexia and other special needs.
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Here's a relevant link:
http://www.scilearn.com/results/student/specialed
Pretty interesting company, actually... educational software based on brain research on how people *actually* learn.
has several games based on typing... Like Typer Shark- http://games.yahoo.com/games/downloads/tps.html
There are probably many others (PopCap or not) online that might be useful.
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
www.the-underdogs.org
They have all the older educational games that you can't hardly find anymore.
Our program, eLocutor (download from http://www.holisticit.com/eLocutor/elocutorv3.htm) is a typing assistant for persons with severe motor disabilities. As such, it places no burden on the user in terms of learning to type as such. Functional operations can be run off using the mouse button only. With a little practice, your brother can watch words being created for him, referenced from the inbuilt dictionary. It installs and runs on Windows only.
However, it was not designed for persons with learning disabilities either. Frankly, we do not know, nor have we researched, whether it serves a useful purpose here.
If your brother takes to it, please do let us know. With very little effort, the dictionary can be modified (and it learns, too) to downsize it (it was set up with 250,000 words, which few people actually use, plus a specialised physics/cosmology section). Doing this will speed up the word retrieval function, of course, though this may not even be a requirement for your brother.
Finally, by installing a text-to-speech app like Festival (which others here have suggested too) the screen will read back whatever is typed, which may assist your brother to learn to associate the words on the screen with the spoken word.
Hope this is useful to you.