Our son, Nicholas, has HFA (High Functioning Autism). He’s 11 years old, fun, quirky, and relatively social. And yet he struggles with many things, like motor planning to catch a ball or ride a bike. And dysgraphia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia) – his handwriting is painfully slow, inconsistent sizing and shapes, and difficult to read. And word finding/retrieval – needed for fluent conversation. Amazingly, technology is helping in a way that I would not have imagined just a few short months ago. We have two recent success stories to share.
The first is speech recognition software. You see, although Nicholas types slightly faster than he can write with a pencil, it can still take 20 minutes just to copy 3 sentences. So we were excited to attach a headset and try the speech to text technology. Which has provided quite a few laughs – since Nicholas’ speech is peppered with hesitations and is soft so the program does not understand all of what he has to say. Still, our little guy loves this technology. He persistently sits and repeats words that he struggles to pronounce clearly… works like ”truth” over and over until the computer correctly translates his speech. He takes a deep breath and concentrates before turning on the speech recognition; carefully composing a sentence in his mind first …it is encouraging to see him going after this. And I know that this work is helping his annunciation and fluency both. He is starting to explore and experiment with life-skills to compensate for his personal challenges. That’s amazing.
The second gain is in spelling word learning and practice. We found an amazing site called www.spellingcity.com. He loves playing the games and even taking the quiz to prove that he has successfully mastered his 20 words each week. We are happy and proud to see him tackling crossword puzzles, vocabulary meaning games and other challenges on the Spelling City website. He used to dread his spelling homework – a time of memorizing and copying words – now he enjoys it!
Should you decide to give Spelling City a try – here are a few technical tips – even though the basic access is free, we quickly purchased the annual home pass so that we could store his spelling words for the week into a list. We name the list by the date so that it is easy to find the correct list. We also use the sentence writing practice and have found that it is important to teach your child not to navigate away from the page mid way through the sentence writing because the form data entry is not persistent (the site will forget what was entered if you do not select save and submit both). Another idea is to enter the spelling words first into a word processing program like GoogleDocs and then copy the words into the batch entry area of list management to enter a new list. Then, use the GoogleDocs file for the sentence writing practice – because GoogleDocs frequently auto-saves your file.
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Tags: hackingautism, software, technology
October 16, 2011 at 3:51 am |
[...] Look into technology to help … here are a few ideas [...]