Assistive Technology Toolkit

In this post I will be analyzing Kelly Ahrens' article about how to make your own AT toolkit. This article is to help teachers and others in general find useful items on their computer that help or can be used as assistive technology. The best part about these tools is that they are free. The first suggestion she makes is google books for the visually impaired. Others include Bookshare and Project Gutenburg which can be assessed through your school site. Another tool she mentions is a smart art plug in that is accessible through Microsoft Office 2007 and gives teachers a concept map tool. She suggests working with the school IT department to get more tools that schools have to offer as they have specific licensing access or administrative rights that teachers do not have. Lastly she gives a list of tools found on the computers themselves. The tools include magnification, on screen keyboards, personalization, and filter keys. These tools allow students to see typing on screen, add language translation and talking clocks to keep time, finally, ignoring of brief keystrokes to increase typing speed an efficiency.
So what about these new tools is useful? This article is written by a technology director of a school district so it is in her best interest to help educators. This is a good article for teachers to learn from because I did not think to use any of these tools and learned about others. I did not know about speech recognition or that computers have the ability to do this. I would like to know how to use this tool. I agree with all of these tools and their use in the classroom and think that many teachers may not know, or even think to use them during the busy school day. The online concept maps and spell checkers were  also good to know about. I also did not know about using the IT department of a school district in the way she suggests. For example though I knew about the licensing, I did not know about disk imaging. Disk imaging is the ability to install multiple forms of software at once rather than one item at a time. This could save teachers lots of time.
As good as the article is there is more to be explained. While she gives a list of all of the tools at the end of the article, she does not tell us how to use them, it is up to the teacher to play with them and figure them out. She also does not tell us where to find these tools on the computer or where we can get help within the computer. This being said some of the tools are known and the average user can figure them out, but not all of them. You can also use the internet to find out how and where these items are on the computer it just takes time.

Ahrens, K. (November, 2011). Build an assistive technology toolkit. Learning and Leading With Technology. Retrieved fromhttp://www.iste.org/store/my-virtual-products