January 2007 — Features
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Assistive Technology :: Making the Impossible Possible
Representing Promethean, Deanna Harrison was one of the people who gave the panels to Griffin. A former teacher, Harrison, in fact, used Promethean’s Activboard— an anti-glare, electromagnetic-surface interactive whiteboard—in her third-grade classroom two years ago. Within four months, her students had improved an entire grade level in reading. She would either read them a story or have them read it, and then she’d ask them questions. She would say, “I don’t want the answers; I want you to highlight where to find the answers.” There on the interactive whiteboard would be the text of the book, and there the students would point out where they found their answers. “I could never have had overheads of every page in the textbook,” says Harrison. “It was just priceless.” Griffin agrees. “It’s a great way of teaching,” he says, “and it makes learning fun for everybody.”
NO ORDINARY JOE: With a pen affixed
to
his visor, Griffin, paralyzed since 2 years old,
works on his Activpanel (enlarged, inset).
Besides Activpanel and Activboard, Promethean offers an array of hardware and software that interacts seamlessly to provide an engaging classroom environment and involve different kinds of learning—visual, audio, and kinesthetic. Activwand is a 21-inch wand that helps young students, students in wheelchairs, and students with poor coordination reach the Activboard; Activstudio is lesson-development software that includes a searchable library of resources; and Activote is a student response system that allows teachers to quickly assess student understanding during a lesson. In addition, Promethean users have access to thousands of readymade lessons aligned to state education standards in a searchable database.
The impact of the company’s suite of assistive technology is not limited to students. Consider Margaret Galligan, a teacher at the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind in St. Augustine, who herself is legally blind. Galligan uses an Activboard in her classroom. She can import text and graphics from the internet and use the batteryfree pen to pose both problems and solutions to her students. She can use the board in myriad ways to make reading and writing more accessible. But one highlight was perhaps unexpected, as she related to a colleague. Galligan signed her name on the interactive whiteboard and then programmed it to zoom in. She said it was the first time in her life that she’d ever seen her own signature.
“Our goal is to say, ‘There’s nothing wrong with you.’”
Among the students currently enrolled in Laurel Springs School, you’ll find Sara Montgomery. You’ll never see her, though, just as you’ll never see the other 5,000 Laurel Springs students—unless you attend the graduation ceremony in Ojai, CA. That’s because Laurel Springs is a distance learning school; its students live all over the United States and abroad (although an additional 7,000 public school students use the Laurel Springs’ curriculum in a traditional classroom setting). And that arrangement suits Sara just fine.
Sara, 16, has Asperger’s syndrome—a neurobiological disorder that resembles high-functioning autism—as well as mild cerebral palsy. Not only wasn’t Sara achieving to her potential in public school, she was becoming more and more isolated. In high school, the situation worsened as Sara had to confront bullies, too. “I felt she wasn’t getting the education she needed,” her mother, Shirley, says. “She started getting depressed.” It wasn’t that the schools didn’t try to accommodate her; it was that their efforts more often than not just made her stand out more.
