02 Sep 4 Assistive Chrome Apps to Supercharge Special Education Programs
Google Chromebooks offer an adaptive learning experience for special education students, increasing equal access to academic success.
With every new generation, educators find more enhanced tools to help students with learning disabilities or physical limitations develop essential cognitive skills and motor functions. Traditional classrooms have to cater to the majority, which often places special education students in an alienated learning environment.
Fortunately, the mobile technology boom isn’t just about tweeting or sharing the latest memes. Streamlined devices with assistive apps, such as Google Chromebooks, have the ability to bridge learning gaps and provide alternative methods of measuring comprehension. Snag these four assistive apps to upgrade lessons in your special education classes.
- Chrome Daltonize
Students coping with color vision deficiency, commonly known as color blindness, are unable to perceive many fine details in their environments. When viewing computer screens, they can easily overlook important visual information, such as hyperlinks, highlighted text and charts, making it difficult to mentally decipher the concepts presented.
Following in the footsteps of revolutionary scientist, John Dalton, Chrome Daltonize digitally “decodes” the details on a screen to provide students with accurate visual imagery, regardless of what variant of color blindness they have. Since Daltonization occurs instantly, students don’t have to waste valuable learning time trying to piece together fragmented information or focus solely on finding ways to compensate for vision deficiencies.
- Cortexit
Students with a wide variety of learning disabilities or vision problems face the same hurdle: reading comprehension. Cortexit is a text dispersant that allows students to select sections of text and conveniently read them line by line in larger, clearer fonts. The app eliminates the problem of dense or jumbled text and makes it easy for students to focus on each word and pace themselves, providing assistance for common disorders, such as ADHD and dyslexia.
- Number Line
Number lines are useful for any student learning foundational math, but they also smooth the path to more complex computations for kids who struggle to make connections between the visual and conceptual representations of math operations. The Number Line app helps students mentally visualize changes in number sequences by giving numbers relative physical positions on a simple spectrum.
Learning occurs more slowly when students can’t tap into their theoretical reasoning skills, so Number Line helps kids ground their thought process by providing a functional illustration they can refer back to when working with number patterns.
- Read&Write for Google
Read&Write is a multifunctional assistive tool that lets students with reading difficulties do everything from summarizing Web text to requesting word definitions. The app makes it easy for students to highlight or capture text from the Internet, and it provides word recommendations to help students form cohesive sentences when writing.
TextHelp designed the app to combat common issues, such as limited staff, by empowering students to obtain in-depth, personalized guidance where needed. Instead of waiting for a teacher to read passages aloud, students can convert text to audio or generate simplified passages to aid them in textual analysis. Basically, Read&Write does the job of an audiobook, translator, Web highlighter and text-to-speech tool.
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