Mr. Rose, a third grade general education teacher, and Ms. Smith, a special education teacher, co-teach in an urban elementary school with a high number of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch. The school integrates computer science and computational thinking into curriculum as part of their science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) initiative. Mr. Rose and Ms. Smith have identified several challenges they will need to address to meet the needs of several of their students with learning disabilities. These challenges include difficulty with complex, multistep problem solving, lack of access to and experience with technology, and difficulty with fine motor skills.
With the passage of federal laws, equal access to technology for all students has gained increased attention in the field of education. Although considering a continuum of assistive technology (AT) products and services for students with disabilities is a mandated practice, educators and related service professionals are faced with challenges of providing effective AT services due to lack of clear legal and practical guidelines and lack of training for the teachers to identify, obtain, and utilize ever-advancing AT. This chapter provides an overview of current AT utilization at schools and related service agencies. AT effectiveness, universal design for learning (UDL), service delivery models, recent trends in AT technologies, challenges in providing AT services for students with disabilities, and implications for preservice and in-service teachers are discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.