Article Response How Use of an iPad... and Touching the Virtual...

Article Response How Use of an iPad... and Touching the Virtual...


While I was reading the articles "How Use of an iPad Facilitated Reading Improvement" and "Touching the Virtual, Touching the Real: iPads and Enabling Literacy for Students Experiencing Disabilities" I remember the article that's floating around Social Media about how young children are using iPads and they are supposedly causing ADHD.  I don't really agree but what I did agree with in the article is that we shouldn't be using technology as babysitters and that as with everything we should be using it with moderation.  

In Touching the Virtual, Touching the Real: iPads and Enabling Literacy for Students Experiencing Disabilities they talked about the positive impact that iPads have on students with LDs.  I completely agree that it is important for students to use technology and that it can only benefit students that are struggling with communication and learning in school.  

Flewitt, Kucirkova and Messer said “Profoundly disabled students were able to exercise control with apps that required less precise touch, evidencing their emerging understanding of cause and effect and their engagement through implicit sensory-motor learning and exploration.”  This year I was introduced to the iPad with one of my students.  In his IPP there was a large focus on communication because he is non-verbal and diagnosed with Autism and Cerebral Palasy.  In the past he used the pec system with a ton of the velcro flashcards made with the Boardmaker program.  We decided to use the app See.Touch.Learn. It’s a great app because you don’t have to worry about losing those darn Velcro flashcards.  Everything is at your hands and we were able to create lessons using pictures from the student’s environment.  One of the things that popped up was an increase of negative behavior when we introduced the app.  After a few weeks attempting to get the student engaged I started to make some inquires with his parents and found out that he had an iPad at home for entertainment.  We realized that every time we went to have a lesson he was associating this with “fun time” and got upset when he didn’t have that time.  After talking to the Autism Specialist we came up with a color cover system where we put an orange cover on the iPad for lessons and a pink one for “fun time”.  After several lessons he picked up on the system and we started to see success. 

It is from this lesson that I realized that it is very important that we have a balance between work and play and that it’s really important that we teach this to our students.