assistive technology and the OSK

I am so excited assistive technology was brought up as an option during this week's work. I think that a major problem with the special education is the lack of communication between general and special ed teachers. Did you know that general education students are not required to take ONE class about special ed students when they will MOST DEFINITELY have a student with some sort of special needs in their classroom? I'm glad this class is at least making general education students aware of the presence and need for assistive technology.

It is also quite interesting that Ira Socol's blog was posted, as I was in his class and am already following it and using it to gain ideas. For this week's assignment, I chose to look at on-screen keyboards. I chose this because over the years of volunteering I have been drawn to the students with fine motor disabilities and think that this would be a wonderful technology for them to get to know. It also fits in with the Toolbelt Theory and FreeTech that Socol speaks of. It is another tool for them to add, and there are free versions avaiable.

Better Living Through Technology is a fantastic website that can help teachers stay up-to-date with the latest assistive technologies. An On Screen Keyboard, or OSK is an extremely useful tool for students with fine motor or visual impairments. As the website explains, "An On-Screen Keyboar is a visual representation of a standard keyboard that can be installed on any Windows computer.OSKs vary a lot in their features. Some are accessible by a variety of pointing devices and some can be accessed by switches and a variety of other innovative access solutions." There are 7 different types of OSK's described on the wesbite, but going with the FreeTech stream, I am going to focus on the free Window's XP OSK.



The Windows XP OSK seems to be the least technologically advanced, but is perhaps one that is best suited for the classroom. A majority of the classrooms I have been in have not had brand new technology available to them, and using a newer OSK would not be suitable. This Windows is limited, but still extremely useful for our purposes.

The website first goes on to say that the visual appearance cannot be changed much. The keyboard stays the same size and you cannot change the colors. This might be a difficulty for students with visual impairments but at the same time still beneficial for students with fine motor impairments. The next aspect talked about is Dwell Delay. Students with fine motor problems find it difficult to double click and this solves the problem. By leaving the mouse over something for a certain amount of time, the user can easily double click.

I think that OSK's are extremely beneficial tools for the classroom. In a classroom that is more technologically adavanced, newer and more rich versions of the OSK can be put into use, but for most classrooms with a lower budget, the Windows XP OSK works great.