Misunderstood Minds and Learning Disabilities

The following introductory video clip from PBS's Misunderstood Minds documentary effectively showcases various families' experiences dealing with learning disabilities and school. It explores issues of assessment, separate class instruction as well as debunking the myth about the perceived over-medication of children with ADHD. Some very personal family stories that struggled to find the successful path for their child.

http://misunderstoodmindsld.blogspot.com/


Misunderstood Minds and Learning Disabilities
Chapter 1:

 

                                                                           

Keyboarding vs. Handwriting Task Analysis

A task analysis for handwriting compared to keyboarding would involve much of the same skill sets but with some differences involving motor skills and sensory processing. Similar skill sets include attention to task, executive functioning, proprioception, idea formulation, image generation, prior knowledge, phonemic awareness, high level content skills, writing formats, short and long term memory, etc.  

Keyboarding would benefit students with graphomotor,  fine motor skills difficulties, visual-motor, and visual-spatial difficulties. However, keyboard use won't improve the output of those students with phonological awareness difficulties or central auditory processing difficulties involving spelling or sentence formation. 

Intuitive and predictive typing programs and spellcheck can independently support slow typists with fine motor challenges who have some word recognition ability and can formulate sentence structure. ex. Co-Writer, WordQ, Kurzweil, TikiNotes app (free), Typo, etc

Co-Writer - the best word predictive word processor available. Has specific vocabulary dictionaries on various curriculum topics.  Teachers can also create your own subject related vocab banks for students to draw from.

Low Tech Handwriting Tools:

                             

Sharpening Up on Pencil Skills (OT):