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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?"
My aunt was a teacher in special education, and I had the opportunity to help out on a few occasions. From talking to her and just interacting with the kids, hands-on learning and human interaction seem to be the best way for many of these kids to learn. Imitation and being able to see the concepts in their hands is probably a far better means of education than just a computer. However, I don't doubt that computer programs coupled with perhaps some sort of hardware controller and a human guide would be beneficial. Good luck to anyone who is helping anyone out with disabilities. Just being there to help works wonders on its own.
From my experience, educational software is usually laughably simple, especially given the price. If you don't totally suck at teh programming, try writing some of your own tools for him and then work with him to refine them and target them towards his specific issues. It doesn't take a rocket scientist. Get a copy of perl/tk or something and start hacking.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
What is a level 10 mental handicap?
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
Maybe FFX and FFX-2. Lots of spoken dialog with captions. Actually any TV that can show CC without having mute on might be good to try. I really don't know what else to tell you. Maybe looking into some adult reading eductation programs in your local area to see if they have any tips.
Video-game related material actually can help. My partner had problems breathing when she was born and suffered motor control damage in her brain (which led her to be epileptic ever since). While mentally she has always been rather intelligent, she was phyiscally slow, which led many of her classmates to assume that she was retarded; they picked on her a lot for it.
:) ).
Based on advice, her parents encouraged her to play video games - especially Tetris - to help increase her coordination. Whether or not it was the cause, today she is about as coordinated as your average person (and can beat my socks off at Tetris, to boot!
"That's Nietzsche. He killed my father." -- Jesus, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
When I was in elementary school, a test that they administered at school determined that I was typing around 800 words per minute.
Of course, that was largely because I figured out that, assuming that the final message you entered was correct, the algorithm counted the number of times you pressed the space bar. So, you just had to simply hold down the space bar, delete the line, hold down the space bar, etc, and then after several tries type in the correct message.
"That's Nietzsche. He killed my father." -- Jesus, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
My brother had a combo of extreem dyslexia and hearing loss which caused a lot of problems in school for him. I was lucky enough to have a teacher who took a special interest in him and learned new teaching techniques in order to help him. He is now in university which is honestly something no one expected when he could not read at all for so long. For him RC car magazines were great, it was something he loved and they offered pictures and diagrams which he could understand even when too frustrated with the text, and encuraged him to keep trying. Technology wise, he swares by dragon dictate now and honestly couldn't get by without it. It gave him a way to write when otherwise his writting made no sense. He has also started using the text-to-speech which comes with windows in order to have dificult text read to him on the computer and with the OCR software that comes with (xp? or the new office? I forget what it came built into....) he is talking about scanning in textbooks to be read to him as well... tedious task, but at least he has more options avalible now to him than he did.
Also, don't question what the material is as long as he will read it. This one sank in as I stood aruguing with my three year old over wanting to buy a comic book. Has to have been on of the dumbest fights I ever picked. The point was, he was reading and I should be encouraging that. Yes. He was 3 and reading. Point is, censoring what he reads, with obvious exceptions, could be a mistake and an unnessecary road block to your over all goal.