Technology making future brighter for students with special needs

In the life skills class at Pizitz Middle School, Madison Escue helps students create videos to promote books, adding slides and music to showcase their skills.

Other students use video to share poems they wrote about their favorite sports, in a tribute to the late NBA legend Kobe Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash earlier this year.

It’s just one of the ways technology is changing the game for students with special needs.

Devices can now help nonverbal students express their needs, video technology allows students to create different projects, and dictation software now trains itself to understand students’ voices. All of these tools, teachers across Vestavia Hills City Schools said, help these students gain the independence they will need once they leave the school system.

“It changes things,” said Raines Moore, a speech pathologist at Vestavia Hills High School. “It puts them on a much more even playing field.”

Moore said the high school has a testing room used by students who need help taking tests, such as having a test read out loud or being able to dictate their answers instead of write them. Traditional students can use the testing center as well, she said.

Moore has been teaching at the high school for five years and in Vestavia since the late 1980s. When she started teaching, case managers for students with special needs would read tests out loud, which took a lot of time for everyone, she said. Technological advancements that allow students to be read the text aloud through other means and allow speech to be translated into text have changed that, she said.

The technology also learns students’ individual voices, helpful discerning dialects and accents.

On English exams, students with reading and writing difficulties can dictate their papers, and teachers can leave voice notes for feedback, Moore said.

GoTalk Now is another tool instructors use to allow nonverbal students to touch icons to express their needs, Moore said. Jane Thornton uses it extensively in the life skills class at Pizitz, where she teaches with Escue.

Students tap pictures of water to show they need water, or a “Help” icon that indicates they need help, Thornton said. It helps both the student and the teacher have easier communication, she said.

“I’ve loved being able to incorporate more than what’s been done in the past,” Thornton said. “They learn more when they’re interactive.”

Moore said while the high school uses certain applications and programs, each student has technology matched to their needs, which is helpful in keeping with the student’s individualized education program.

For all of the students in her classes at Pizitz, Escue said she makes sure to celebrate “every success.” Technology ensures there are more of those successes to celebrate.

As the world around them grows more accustomed to using technology, so are students with special needs, helping ensure they are ready for the world that awaits them when they graduate from high school.

“I feel like it’s constantly evolving,” Escue said. “It allows them to find things out about life in general. It makes me confident for them.”

Escue is in her third year of teaching and said when she was earning her college degree in education, she learned much about technology, but technology has expanded even in the few years since she started teaching. “It definitely exceeded my expectations,” she said.

Teachers take advantage of Rebel Tech University, a program where tech-savvy instructors and staff help teachers across the district learn to use technology and stay on top of changing trends.

Meredith DeFore, director of special education for the district, said technology has changed tremendously.

Vestavia has been able to afford this new technology through generous grants, including one that funded the testing room, money given by state Sen. Jabo Waggoner, who lives in the city.

The district also has special computers for students who use Braille, and there are devices that help students that cannot move do “all types of things,” DeFore said.

The technology allows students to interact with their peers in regular education classes and, in some instances, to be in classrooms with them, she said. “There’s more inclusion now.”

For 16 years, Kem Bennett has been teaching students with special needs, including the past 12 years at Vestavia Hills Elementary West.

“I really enjoy working with the families,” Bennett said. “I try to really get [as] close to the parents as I can.”

When she started teaching, there was no technology for teachers, she said. Now, with new programs and technologies coming every year, Bennett is able to use things like Promethean boards, translation services for non-English speaking families and Google Chromebooks to communicate with families and help her students.

“I think I just love seeing where they grow and learn, how excited they get,” Bennett said.

Nicole Scozzaro is in her 10th year of working as a speech therapist at Vestavia Hills Elementary Cahaba Heights. Between using a Gooseneck Switch for students who use wheelchairs to using iPad apps, technology plays a big role in her work.

“There’s all kinds of ways these days to give students a voice,” Scozzaro said. “Everybody needs to have a voice.”

Scozzaro said a student at her school uses a BIGmack switch, which produces audio, to say “Hi friends” to his classmates.

“I love the response it gets from other kids,” Scozzaro said. “They get excited, ‘He said hi to me!’”

Students learn to be kind, and students with special needs are included in many activities with their fellow students, she said.

“Putting them in classrooms with [their] peers shows them … they’re just like me,” Scozzaro said.

Technology helps those students with special needs feel like they have the same opportunities, sometimes literally at their fingertips, as their peers without special needs, she said. “It gives them access to a world they wouldn’t have if we didn’t have technology.”