Monday, April 21, 2014

Technology Tools for Visual-Spatial or Motor Control Difficulties

Students with Visual-Spatial or Motor control dissabilities may experience difficulty writing numbers, aligning digits in computation problems, and creating visual representations suchs as shapes, or angles. These students usually have a hard time writing work down with pencil and paper, and when they do it is very difficult to read. It is especially difficult for these students to write down computation problems with numbers in the correct place value space. Keeping numbers in the respective ones, tens and hundreds place is exceptionally difficult. Luckily there are applications that help students with these types of issues.

Math Pad- This application is a talking math worksheet program that allows students to perform computations with whole numbers on the computer. It is much like performing computation using a pen and pencil. This allows students with fine motor disabilities access the curriculum by allowing them to click the mouse and use the key pad. Customizable speech output can allow students to access this  who have visual impairments.

MAth Pad Plus- This application extends the features of the Math Pad to computation with decimals and fractions computation. Studetns have th option of viewing the problem as a pie chart, fraction bar, and decimal grid. Students are able to manipulate numbers and computation directly on screen.

Virtual pencil- This application helps students work through basic operations of whole numbers, fractions and decimals. If it is paired with a screen reading software it provides speech feedback for students who are blind or visually impaired.

Math Talk/Scientific Notebook- This application must be used with Dragon Natural Speaking voice recognition software because when the student speaks the math problems, it writes and records the equation or problem. It can be used with prealgebra, algebra, trig, calc, stats, and graduate level math courses.

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