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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?"
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...
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."
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.
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.