By Adalie Clothier

Growing up, I have always been surrounded by Special Education students and ways of learning and teaching. I have a cousin with down syndrome, I currently nanny for a family who has a 5 year old with autism, and my grandmother was a special education teacher for over 20 years, and I constantly hung out in her classroom with her.

I never realized how many tools there are to make learning much more easy and accessible for so many students. I was looking on Stockton University’s accessibility toolbox, and was fascinated by all of the options.

Dragon Naturally speaking is a program that allows students to think out loud. Students can speak to their computer and create, format and edit documents. I think this is very important for students who do not know how to properly verbalize what they are thinking, or who think faster than they can write. Another software program that I find very helpful is JAWS. This program is a screen reader that heavily assists students who have much trouble reading off of a screen or using a computer mouse. Along these lines is a program called ZoomText, this allows for magnification of text for low-vision students.

There are also many different pieces of equipment that I did not even know existed that could be life changing to some students. There is a C-Pen reader, that when pointed at text, reads it out loud. This also assists students that may be visually impaired or even dyslexic. There are FM Systems that use radio waves to send signals to hearing aids. This is obviously very important for students who are hearing impaired, because this will allow them to hear their professors and the lectures.

Along the lines of lectures, there are smart pens that are basically regular pens with bluetooth. These pens collect audio from the lectures and uses the bluetooth to send the audio to a phone or tablet to be able to revisit the lecture. The final equipment piece that I find to be really important and beneficial is Thunder T3 earmuffs. These earmuffs use air flow control to minimize and reduce the noise in a classroom. Extra noise in the classroom can be very overwhelming for all students, especially ones with sensitive hearing or hearing difficulties.