Special Education and Dyslexia
The field of special education has been quite neglected in the past years. Nobody saw the need for it until the late 1980s. Although there have been institutions offering special education during the early 1980s, these institutions were not as developed before as they have become now. The growth of the field has been amazingly fast in the past years as evaluation and diagnosis of special conditions and special needs took great leaps and bounds. Techniques in identifying children with special needs have vastly improved making the field more effective in its objectives. There have been much technological advancement in the past years, especially with the advent of the new millennium and these innovations have helped greatly in the improvement of the field of special education. More than just the innovations, the field of special education is now more equipped to provide efficient and quality education to its recipients, like dyslexic patients for instance.
Children with dyslexia have a normal intelligence level; the only problem with them is that they have an impairment of their ability to read. Dyslexic children are usually confused with certain letters and tend to interchange certain consonants with the others (m & n, for instance). In certain cases, dyslexic children even have trouble reading words in the proper order because of their weak visual and phonetic memory. Other than just reading, dyslexic patients also have trouble writing. In terms of spelling and grammar, some dyslexics can spell well and construct sentences the way these should be constructed. However, because of the impairment in their visual and phonetic memory, even spelling and grammar sometimes suffers.
Dyslexics are also confused with regards to spatial orientation, like when determining which was is left, right, front or back, or the geographical directions of north, south, east and west Dyslexics will also have a problem with numbers especially in the sequences of numbers in mathematical equations.
There is no cure for dyslexia but with special education, teaching strategies can be used to enhance the existing abilities of the child to compensate for the lacks caused by dyslexia. A major objective with dyslexic children is to improve their confidence and self-esteem so that they are not limited by their dyslexic conditions. Of course, the earlier a child is subjected to programs designed to address the condition, the greater the chances are of improving how the child will handle it.
Nowadays, other than just the conventional special teaching strategies used for dyslexics, technological interventions have been developed to help dyslexic children further and to make them more productive members of society. An interesting technological innovation is known as Word Q, which is quite like the predictive text input on your cellular phones, except that this is a computer program designed to improve the writing confidence of dyslexic students. Most dyslexics shy away from writing using a pen and paper because of the condition. Word Q can help in this aspect by offering an innovative way for dyslexic students to write. With Word Q, dyslexics can type a word and the program will automatically predict what is being written. As an added feature, the program can also read back the word that was written so that the student can actually validate what he/she wrote on the screen. The program is currently available for computers with the Windows operating system. It can be used to assist email, word processing, internet surfing, and all other on-screen operations that require the student to write something. There is only an English and a French version at the moment.
Innovations like Word Q make special education very rewarding, not only for the teacher, but the student as well. In as much as special education teachers practice their profession efficiently to address the needs of children with special needs, having assistance from technology can only work to improve the field and allow special education teachers and students to achieve their goal faster and more effectively.
We don’t know what the future holds for the field of special education, but at the rate technology is going, we can only hope that this field is not neglected the way it had been in years past. With a growing world, we also have to face the bleak truth that more and more children are born with special needs, and neglecting the field of special education would easily translate into neglecting the children who are in need of this special approach to learning.
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