Finding Your Passion

The things we need to ask ourselves about assistive technology are: 

• What are the tools

•  And why are we using them? 

The reason for assistive technology is really to level the playing field for the student, to be able to do exactly what you and I take for granted.

We all have different towns and we all have different things that we do in the course of the day. It may be that the student is a great artist or a great writer. When it comes to assistive technology we have to think about what is going to give that student the ability to do what they love without having to see roadblocks and go, "I can't do that”. There are so many tools out there, whether it's a communication app, a video app, a math tool. With assistive technology you are not making the student into what you want them to be. 

We may not know what they want to be, and they may not know what they want to be, so they should have the opportunity to explore. The interrelationship between all those tools may not at first be obvious, but in use you begin to see how the video tool might allow someone to communicate what they have learned in math. The communication tool might allow someone to tell a story using that video program, and now that person is creating talking books. 

It's about the students. They see how these tools might work together. They start playing with them and realize, "You know what, I can do this with this”, and that's what it's all about.