Slashdot Mirror
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?"
what makes you think any amount of technology could help? computers can't work miracles. psychiatry ... might.
Almost agreed; I would have said psychology & friends instead.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
And if you are suggesting psychiatry for a learning disability, you obviously dont have a clue what learning disabilities are all about.
LD's are in the realm of psychology, and that is a HUGE difference.
Sadly, I dont have any better answer than the guy taht does indeed sound like a troll.
What is the nature of your brother's disability? PDD? DS? Kanner's autism? Dyslexia? CHI? What defines "effective" software is going to vary considerably based on the diagnosis...
I'd start with books, magazines, newspapers, or comics. The trick is to probably go with something he's interested in. Video game magazines might be a good bet.
Since most of the replies are crap i am going to post an advice that has helped me learn to read very well:
Read as many books as posible - start with the really easy and move on. In the beginning your brother will properly need someone to read the words to him - he will then reconise them later. A good tool might be festival
As for natual selection post above:
Our society is rich - it can afford (and should) aford to help everybody, how wish to be helped
Freedom or George Bush
Yes - but educational software is simple for a reason, and very planned in it's simplicity. Every educational software company has a few dev's, yes - but they have a leigion of instructional designers and people who specilize in communicatating with children/disabled people to actualy create the content.
Get a copy of perl/tk or something and start hacking.
I'd add: get a copy of Logo* and start hacking with him.
* (and, ideally, a "turtle" or some other fun drawing robot - you could even DIY)
This is where the serious fun begins.
I left computer engineering to persue a major in Special Education. My main desire is to work with middle school or older persons with disabilities. And the problem described by the original poster is a common issue. Age appropriate activitied for the mentally handicapped are seriously lacking.
It just isn't right to have a 22 year old man putting colored blocks into the right shape holes -- no matter how severe the handicap. I think that technology can be useful (but most likely you, or someone with programming ability) are going to have to create it yourself. In a similar manner, it is often up to the family to be creative and create age-appropriate activities for their handicapped family member.
The schools, at least my program, are seriously working on approaching this issue and designing activites for people like your brother. But they fail as often as they succeed.
[Don't ask how I ended up in this major from computer engineering. I'm not sure myself.]
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
for they are subtle and quick to anger."
He's into video games eh? Crack open a remedial reading textbook, write a video game based on it's methods. You benefit from the know-how of the "experts" and your brother benefits from you making learning not boring. You could do it in Flash or something and make it really A/V cool.
There is one educational program that I personally found helpful, and that was MathBlaster.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
What's the scale?
How about watching TV with the closed captions turned on? I think it's standard in every television now. Poke around the on-screen menus. Start with really easy kids shows and progress from there. I think with a lot of DVDs you can turn on English subtitles even with the English sound track. Maybe it'll help tie the written words to the spoken ones, and some sort of connection will result.
So he's an otherwise healthy 18 year old? And kiddie games are out of the question eh?
What do healthy 18 year olds like?
Pr0n of course!!
So make a webpage with math problems, and if he gets it right, he gets a pr0n pic. This would take all of 15 minutes to write the html for (okay maybe 45minutes if you get distracted by the Pr0n), and would be a simple incentive system.
Okay, okay, so it doesn't have to be nudie pics, but seriously, some sort of quickly made webpage with multiple problems that have an appealing reward might be useful (mp3 plays, or if he gets a high enough score you'll take him to dinner or something... if it's a fun outcome, it should be a positive experience for him, and he just might learn something too.
If you take my advice on the MP3, just promise not to tell the RIAA it was my idea! *adjusts his foil hat*
I'm too lazy to enter a sig. Hey wait a second! You tricked me!
As someone who helped LD kids in k-12 (while i myself was in k-12) its important to remember the differences between someone with LD and someone without. Many people assume that LD is some sort of delayed reaction, that eventually they will learn like a normal person, which just isnt true. Every avenue of enforcement is needed to effectively teach, computers or other 'single avenue' methods are largely useless. They will respond the best to a human teacher approaching them with a very diverse toolset, as opposed to being battered with the same approach like computer learning. Keep in mind its NOT easy and there is little precedent for acheiving good success with people who have LD.
You know we all like the odd troll now and again and nothing wrong with a bit of Linux/Windows/Mac bashing whatever, but it is pretty low to mock some guy with a disability. People don't ask for these things in life.
Some restaint by the usual trolls would be in order. If you have nothing worth saying to help the poster of the original article then just keep quiet and wait for the next KDE/Linspire/Mac Mini mod/Windows is taking over the world thread etc.
GOOD educational software not only requires programming and multimedia skills, but a real understanding of the teaching methods, learning patterns, and other psychological aspects of education, not to mention mastery of the subject matter, and an ability to get inside the learners' heads and explain things clearly in a way that they will understand.
And that's before you start dealing with special educational software for learning disabilities or physical disabilities.
There's a world of difference between a program that quizzes you on your basic math, and a proper educational tool.
"I would have said psychology & friends instead."
.don't expect them to grow your brother a new spinal column. It just doesn't work like that. They're crutches, and likely will remain so during your lifetime. . .and beyond.
You beat me to it. I am dyslexic, dysgraphic and a bit dyspraxic.
Back in the 60s I served as a test subject for psychological research on these. People have actually come up to me and said,"Hey, I was reading a paper on learining disabilities and your name was in it, is that you?" Yeah, it's me, and my stepfather once won an award from the National Optemetric Society for best magazine article of the year on learning disabilities (which I've never read, and my brother is incapable of reading.
After going through years of testing and research and dealing with the issues personally for decades I can't say I can offer much to the questioner. If anyone had found viable means of correcting such disabilities they would already be applying them to your brother, n'est-ce pas?
Learning disabilities are a neurological disability. Like having a severed spinal column, and it's just as idiotic to tell a dyslexic/dysgraphic he should just try harder to spell correctly as it is to tell a parapalegic to just try harder to jog.
And anyone who tries to do so just makes themselves look like the idiot (dyslexics are, statistically, actually above average in intelligence).
As a physical disability you have to think in terms of physical strategies, patterning exercises and such. They help, but they take a lot of time and energy and don't produce anything like a miracle; and what effect they do have is acute, not chronic, like body building. If you don't keep doing it the "muscle" goes away.
So is there technology? Yeah, I suppose, like spell checkers, but. .
The best thing you can do is learn to accept the fact that your brother is disabled, learn to cope with that, and hence help him to cope with it too.
KFG
I'm a high school teacher, and for the most part school districts in the state of Kentucky are required to help individual students that have disabilities in reading etc.
Read and Write Gold is the app that is used most often to help students with reading disabilities.
From my point of view though, I've seen the use of this technology actually lower testing scores when tests are given and the technology isn't used. This is compared to how the student would have done after several weeks of non-use.
Software, and computers in general tend to cause mental dependency on the part of the learner. I have actually seen something that looks like withdrawl symptoms when the software isn't available to the student. It's scary. I used to spell words very well, but these days I find that I have to keep OpenOffice open all the time just for a real quick spell check! I'm thoroughly dependent on the technology.
I whole heartedly agree with most of the closed captioning posts. Whatever you do please make sure that most of the work is done by your "student" and not technology. People are A LOT like pop corn, the only way to get the good stuff out of a kernel of corn is to apply heat, steam, and pressure.
they have a leigion of instructional designers
If only that was the case. Most "educational" software I have had the displeasure of looking at was a mess put together by well meaning but otherwise useless hacks. One of the underlying problems is a poor understanding of computers, and how computers can relate to learning.
This may seem counterintuitive, but I believe the best way to learn to read is by reading. Grab a book... a good story, from a genre he'd like... and read it with him. Let him do the reading and help him when he gets stuck. But let the story do the teaching. Then read another one together. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Why Vegan? No other food choice has a farther-reaching and more profoundly positive impact on all of life on Earth.
I have CP (Cerebral Palsy), and friends with CP, as well as a sister who is very similar to what you described. I'll have my father post as well but:
1. Have the school teach him how to read one-on-one through the educational plan (IEP)--they are required to educate any person until age 21.
2. Use ESL books of popular stories or Sparknotes.
3. There are some really good thought-provoking stories written for the third-fifth grade level. I know he is not there yet--get him there.
There is software such as Kurzweil 3000 or WYNN that are reading aids.. that will speak text, highlight text, and have a built-in dictionary. (the dictionary talks too.)
There are also children's dictionaries on CD-ROM.
Ultimately, you need to look at electronic books in general, and audio books. Get him interested in the material, and give him the motivation neccessary to succeed.
Bookshare.org is an organization that provides an e-book sharing service for disabled people, legal under U.S copyright law. This service works with the Kurzweil 3000 software I suggested earlier.
But the ultimate thing that worked for my sister was Instant Messaging. She had to learn how to decipher acronyms, which also gave her the feeling of fitting in. She figured out tenses and complex sentences, from barely reading at all.
Do NOT get frustrated with him. Your mileage may vary. He may not even be interested in IM. But if you can get him to have a screenname and get his buddies to write him as they normally would any other person, he will learn by immersion and things will improve.
--Sam
P.S One more note: Do not prevent him from using materials that are "too young" for him. It is sometimes neccessary, and if he can realize that *on his own* so much the better.