A Response to Touching the virtual, touching the real: iPads and enabling literacy for students experiencing disability

After navigating through the heavy, technical vocabulary and language of Touching the virtual, touching the real: iPads and enabling literacy for students experiencing disability, I began to see many trends which I see daily within my own classroom throughout the article.  Flewitt, Kucirkova & Messer noted that through their research, most students with disabilities found technology-mediated writing to be the easiest way to write.  This year in my classroom, I struggled to find technology to help 4 of my IPP students be more independent writers.  I approached my literacy mentor, because I found I was often giving a lot of attention during small group writing to these students, because without it, I found that they struggled to write and work independently.  This often lead to a lack of written output or in one case behaviour challenges which would then take my attention away from the other 20 students in my class. 

Through work with both the literacy and technology mentor at the board, I began to implement compensatory and remediation strategies for these 4 students.  Although I did not have access to any iPads, the program WordQ and speech to text were extremely beneficial for them.  I cannot imagine the success they could have had if given the opportunity to work with a portable and interactive iPad.  For one of my students, “appearing” different was a real challenge for him.  Although his learning disability made his writing for the most part illegible, he often resisted writing on the computer.  I adopted the saying in my classroom “Fair is not always equal” as a way of explaining to students that some students got to use the computers more often than others.  I was lucky that I had empathetic and understanding students who realized that for some students, not having the technologies to assist them made it very hard for them to do things that some students could easily do (like writing for example).

This article also brings to light the benefits that students with disabilities receive by feeling empowered by the ability to express themselves, in ways that was not possible without the flexibility of the iPad and the software that it is able to offer (Flewitt, Kucirkova & Messer, 2014).  Many of the students mentioned in this article developed enthusiasm through their newfound ability to express themselves and were more motivated during literacy activities.  They finally had an outlet that allowed them to “…project their personal identity within the classroom..” (Flewitt, Kucirkova & Messer, pg. 115), through the use of touch on the iPad. 

As it is our primary goal as educators to facilitate independence with our students, it would appear that the iPad is one way to do this with students who struggle to express themselves in the way which our traditional education system prefers (for example a pencil and a paper).  It is important to consider the benefit of touch and use of technologies and software that allow students these opportunities, so that all students can have the opportunity to shine and feel successful in our classrooms.  
A link to the article can be found here.