Serving Special Learners

By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 1/1/2006

Students well versed in today’s technology often feel they are heading back to the Stone Age every morning when they go to school. “Even struggling students and readers are using technology in common ways and believe that [teachers] don’t get it,” says Tracy Gray, project director of the National Center for Technology Innovation (NCTI) (www.nationaltechcenter.org), which held its eighth annual Technology Innovators Conference in Washington, DC, in November 2005 to find better ways to serve students with special needs.

NCTI recently issued recommendations on how schools can better prepare to meet students’ expectations in a report called “Moving Toward Solutions: Assistive and Learning Technology for All Students,” released this month. One suggestion? That teacher preparation programs raise the bar on technology skills that educators need to teach today’s tech-savvy students.

In the meantime, suggests Gray, educators should bone up on the tools students are already using, such as podcasts, blogs, and e-books. Even the predictive spell-check programs found in most basic cell phones, which try to assume words being typed into a text message, can be a valuable learning tool for struggling readers.

“It’s up to us as educators to understand how to use this technology,” she says. “It’s not going away. We can learn how to effectively incorporate it and engage [students], or we can ignore it and lose more kids.”