Assistive Technology

We recently purchased an assistive technology for learning disabilities: Kurzweil.

http://www.kurzweiledu.com/kurz3000.aspx

It is a cool software that reads what you wrote back to you so you can hear your mistakes. It reads your text books while highlighting th text and allows you to highlight and take notes in the program while you are reading, then push a button to have the highlighted areas turn into a study guide. There is a lot you can do with it to help with learning. We are just beginning to use it but I wanted to highlight it as a potential resource. It can be used from elementary school thru college.

Mom vs Monkey

Last nite I was helping my 10 year old daughter get herself organized for upcoming practice spelling tests and real spelling tests. Because of her dyslexia she has this very convoluted, though logical way of taking spelling tests: she groups the words together so there is some kind of logic to them.

So I was writing up templates for the spelling tests. They looked something like this:

-ch
1.
2.
3.
4.

known words
1.
2.
3.
4.

-ic
1.
2.
3.

glued sounds
1.
2.
3.
4.

Weird words
1.
2.
3.
4.

Each of the titles is color coded, so I had to write the template and then color code properly. Then I had to put a box around "weird". And that is were it all fell apart. On one of the templates, I forgot to put a box around "weird". My daughter took one look at it and said to me, "I should have hired a monkey"!

I cracked up! She was totally slamming her mother, who has an MBA!

For a non-dylexic, I was doing the best I could!!!!!