Tech For Special Ed Essay, Research Paper

DYNAMYTE

During my visit to a Technology Center, I was able to view various technological devices used for assisting disabled students. While many of the devices intrigued me, I found the machine DynaMyte to be the most impressive. The machine is used to help students to communicate.

This machine has a touch screen that enables students to put sentences together. The screen consists of twenty-five boxes, which link to different aspects of a chosen topic. For instance, if a student touched the ?Home? topic, they will be linked to another page containing various sub-topics associated with the home. By choosing various words, the students can arrange sentences. With a touch of the screen, the computer through synthesized speech, communicates the sentence that the student has produced. The device is also useful by keeping track of the words they have created for their sentence.

This device is used to help students who posses a lack of motor abilities, speech impediments, autism, cerebral palsy, as well as other disabilities. The machine has several ?switches? which the consumer could purchase, to help them compensate for their particular disability. The machine typically costs between seven and eight thousand dollars. The price can increase with several additives. Besides the ?switches?, the consumer could also opt for a larger screen, which would bring up the price of the DynaMyte. This machine was created to be a compact version of the DynaBox, which is twice the size of the DynaMyte.

This machine is very useful in helping students to communicate. Though the instructor did mention noted concern about the students desire to pursue speaking by themselves, she stated that the overall opinion of this machine was optimistic.