Day 4 - Writing Task Analysis and AT for Writing

Today was another eye opening class. It brought to light the complexities of writing. Before then, I never really thought about all the skills needed to complete that task. As with reading, writing requires you to simultaneously execute multiple task without even thinking about what you are doing. If there is one area of the task that is weaker than the other or  that you are unable to complete independently it can have a profound impact. It can impact the quality and quantity of work that a student produces. Often we see this when students pass in work and when we go to review it, we say to ourselves, "that's not what I expected from that student."

It can be a difficulty task in narrowing down how to better assist the student in achieving their writing potential. Often it comes to providing the student with assistive technology to support their writing. Many of the tools that we looked at today, would help the diverse writers that we have in our class. Low-tech tools such as pencil grips are simple but can be just the support the student needs to relieve their barrier in writing.

Other more high-tech tools and software that were explored today target our student who have a learning disability in writing. This includes software and apps that are available over multiple platforms. Apps that help emergent writers, like Clicker 6, that allows students to write using visual symbols.  Word prediction apps and extensions like, Co-Writer and Google Read & Write supports students who have difficulty encoding. Voice recognition apps like Dragon Dictation and Siri supports students who are physically unable to manually write and to write quickly for others.

As a group we explored writing apps and extensions that support students via Chromebook. The Chrome store provided many apps and extensions supporting a variety of writing needs.  Below is a wordle that we created highlighting some of the apps and extension that we found.