In this tutorial we were lucky enough to have a guest speaker to come and talk to us about his area of work. He is an Occupational Therapist working in a school with children who have very high needs disabilites and he uses alot of assitive technology in his everyday work. His talk was awesome, and he showed us alot of photos and videos of his students using the equipment. It was so cool to see his students using the equipment and figuring out for themselves how it all worked. He even bought along some of his equipment and let us have a wee play. One of the items he bought along was an iPad. The iPad offers a huge range of applications which are very interactive and fun! It is about the size of a regular novel, however alot thinner and very light. It has a touch screen which is great for all of the interactive applications. It retails for around $799 in New Zealand and applications range from free up to around $10, however the majority are around the $1-3 mark.
The reason this is so great for children with disabilities is the level of interactivity and the range of applications available. They can help with reading, writing, maths, and even just be fun little games. The iPad is so much fun to use, I got to have a little play with it in the tutorial and we played clapping games with a Giraffe, which was simple, great fun and very cute!
Below I have included a video clip I found from http://www.youtube.com/ which shows an autistic boy using the iPad to do his homework. It is great to see how much he enjoys using the iPad and how enthused he is about getting his work done.
References:
Wikipedia, (2010). Assistive Technology. Retrieved, April 20, 2011, from http://www.wikipedia.com/
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