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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?"
I learned to read and type as a kid with Nintendo Power magazine and Mario Teaches Typing.
"All it takes to fly is to hurl yourself at the ground... and miss." - Douglas Adams
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.
Number Munchers. Nuff said.
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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.
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www.n1ywb.com
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...
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.
I have a little brother who is now 18 and still can not read or do basic math.
Get him a slashdot account, he will fit right in.
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.
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
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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
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.
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.
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.
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'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.