TECHnology and literacy for adolescents with disabilities

King-Sears, Margaret Elaine, Swanson, Christopher, & Mainzer, Lynne. (2011). TECHnology and literacy for adolescents with disabilities. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 54(8), 569-578.

At first, I thought to myself, “Uh-oh. Here comes another article describing a decision making model with a cute acronym.” With that in mind, the article started slowly for me as the acronym’s four steps (the letters in TECH stand for Target, Examine, Create, and Handle) were outlined and described. Up to that point, I was still thinking, “Yeah, yeah, another acronym, another model.” Then I got to the good part (luckily in this journal length restrictions keep that from happening too late in most cases!). The authors made the TECH model come to life by taking readers through not one but two authentic examples of how the model was used to make decisions about what technologies to use with specific students and how to use those technologies. The two examples are both interesting, and are quite different from each other. The first case is a male seventh grader with a written language disability; the second is a female tenth grade with Asperger’s syndrome. These two cases are similar to those that many teachers encounter every day. For both cases, the authors work their way meticulously through the four TECH steps, and in the process, share the real-life stories of these two young people and the teachers who worked with them. Then after the cases, which are the heart of the article, we get to the gravy: Table 1. That table provides a short list of eight types of assistive technology. Then for each type, we get actual names of products, and even web sites we can visit to find out more. I’m definitely going to visit some of those sites. This table will definitely become dated in a year or two as even newer technologies become available, some of which we probably cannot even imagine now. For now though, I plan to share this table with my students and colleagues (and hopefully the whole article with some). It can provide a beginning for our thinking about how we can use technology to adapt instruction to better meet students’ needs.

A final note: I fully appreciate the authors’ clear and complete discussion of what makes a technology choice an “assistive technology” and when something is simply “classroom technology”. Along with that, I appreciated the authors’ sensitivity to the issues raised when certain technology is used only with “special needs” students. In both cases given here, the desire not to be embarrassed by conspicuous use of assistive technology was an issue for the students. Not only that, it is probably desirable to make such technology available to ALL students if we possibly can. Multiple ways of “reading” and “writing” for all students would seem valuable in any classroom, whether they qualify as “assistive technology” or not.