i need summery of this Using Apple Technology to Support Learning for Students w

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i need summery of this

Using Apple Technology to Support Learning for Students with Sensory and Learning Disabilities
The science of learning seeks to understand the relationship between brain development, social interaction, and learning by drawing on the fields of psychology, neuroscience, machine learning, and education.1 This research holds great promise for improving our teaching practices for all students and helping us develop more effective approaches to teaching children with sensory and learning disabilities.
Many of the universal design features built into Apple hardware and software offer simple but powerful ways to support diverse learners’ needs, both in classrooms and at home. This white paper provides an overview of educational technology policy and practice with concrete examples of how teachers, students, and parents can use Apple technology to make a difference for students with sensory and learning disabilities.

Educational Technology Today
Technology is regularly integrated into educational programs and practice to facilitate learning for students of all abilities across all grade bands. As specialized features are offered within mainstream products, students with disabilities are increasingly able to interact with classroom technologies and teachers are increasingly able to customize content for varying students’ needs or preferences. Moreover, new technology uses and educational applications specifically for students with disabilities emerge daily from researchers, curriculum developers, teachers, parents—and even students themselves. These factors are contributing to a national dialogue on changes in policies and instructional methodologies that can affect when and how technology is used in special education.

Policy background
The 2004 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education
Act (IDEA) details the requirements and resources for special education
services in the United States. The following categories of disability can qualify a student for special education services:
• Autism • Orthopedic impairment
• Deaf-blindness • Other health impairment
• Deafness • Specific learning disability
• Emotional disturbance • Speech or language impairment
• Hearing impairment • Traumatic brain injury
• Mental retardation • Visual impairment
• Multiple disabilities
The IDEA requires Individualized Education Program (IEP) teams, which include parents, to review and recommend assistive technologies (ATs) and determine required accommodations for an individual student. This includes specialized technologies required for students with sensory or learning disabilities to access or produce printed materials, interact with classroom content, or communicate with their teachers and peers.
Many more students, however, could benefit from more deliberate use of new features built into today’s technologies. Currently, the largest number of students receiving special education services are in the “specific learning disability” category. This growing student population experiences difficulty in oral expression, written expression, listening comprehension, basic reading skills, reading fluency skills, reading comprehension, mathematics calculation, or mathematics problem solving. For many students, these learning difficulties will remain lifelong challenges, but others will develop compensatory skill sets or successful coping strategies. Technology use can be a key factor for some students in turning a learning disability into a learning difference.
The 2002 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—better known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB)—stresses ongoing assessment to identify and remediate the academic performance of underachievers and at-risk students before they fail and potentially become eligible for special education services. NCLB gave rise to a new paradigm for instructional practice embodied in the Response to Intervention (RTI) model. RTI programs utilize benchmark assessments to identify struggling students and then deliver tiered interventions designed to improve
Using Apple Technology to Support Learning for Students with Sensory and
Learning Disabilities
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academic
performance as documented by progress monitoring. Many states, districts, and school programs are implementing RTI models that call for classroom implementation of differentiated instruction. Consequently, administrators, specialists, teachers, parents, and students are eager for personalized and efficient methods to access information and interact with content to deepen understanding. Technology use can also be a key factor for these models.
Differentiated instruction and technology
No one knows better than teachers that one size does not fit all. Differentiated instruction requires teachers to provide content that is adapted appropriately for the range of students in each classroom, to teach using flexible strategies that offer varying ways for students to interact with the content and with each other, and to offer students a range of methods for documenting their learning.2
Within both preservice teacher training and professional development, teachers are increasingly trained to identify and compensate for learning differences and disabilities in their instructional practices. Given the trend towards mainstreaming, general education teachers need these skills to provide the bulk of day-to-day instruction for students with disabilities in inclusive classrooms, with input and support from special education staff and specialists.
Schools are also increasingly offered technology-enabled curricula that provide scaffolded methods of interaction and understanding for students with learning disabilities, some of whom also have sensory or motor disabilities. Many of these curricula incorporate flexible design approaches based on brain research and/or universal design principles. For example, Richard Mayer proposes evidenced-based multimedia design principles that illustrate how learning is enhanced when instructional materials anticipate the cognitive processing load required at every stage of learning.3 He offers specific multimedia design recommendations that:
• Reduce extraneous processing
• Support essential processing of key facts and concepts
• Foster generative processing to build knowledge
Mayer’s findings indicate that the proper combinations of input—such as animation with narration or images with the relevant words adjacent to them—can increase how much students learn from multimedia materials. His research also shows that students learn better when lessons are written with a conversational rather than a formal style, suggesting that our social engagement with the material affects how we learn.
One of the most widely adopted curricular frameworks for differentiated learning is the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) defined by the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST). UDL encourages the development of curricular content that provides children with learning and physical disabilities with multiple pathways, motivating feedback, alternate content presentations, and scaffolded supports.4 UDL takes as a given the wide range of variation within groups of students and the need to offer approaches that work for individual students. CAST’s National Center on Universal Design for Learning offers a comprehensive set of guidelines and checkpoints that encourage developers to provide:
• Multiple methods of representation
• Multiple means of action and expression
• Multiple means of engagement
Using Apple Technology to Support Learning for Students with Sensory and Learning Disabilities
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The center’s website offers examples of technology supports and a growing research base for each UDL principle as well as guidance on how to provide options for all students.
A chart in the appendix of this white paper maps the built-in features and applications found in Apple hardware and software to the principles of CAST’s Universal Design for Learning and offers links to research that can support the use of each feature with different populations

What technology works for which students:
The National Center for Learning Disabilities defines a learning disability as “a neurological disorder that affects the brain’s ability to receive, process, store, and respond to information.”Such a disorder can affect an individual’s listening, speaking, reading (dyslexia), writing (dysgraphia), or mathematics (dyscalculia) abilities. Attention and organizational disorders or nonverbal learning disorders (NVLD) affect both cognitive and interpersonal capacities. Students with sensory disabilities have hearing or vision loss and may also have related or unrelated learning or organizational disabilities. All of these disabilities can be co-occurring.
Using Apple Technology to Support Learning for Students with Sensory and Learning Disabilities

Technologies that help address physical and time constraints can have a measurable impact on students’ engagement with learning, as can technologies that scaffold reading, writing, and organization. We know that students who struggle to understand print, visual, and auditory inputs are less able to experience deep engagement while learning new content because the decoding process consumes a disproportionate share of working memory. We know that students who struggle with expressive language disorders are less able to show their learning through speech or text. Students with attention disorders struggle with the organization of material, time, and ideas and find it difficult to begin, sustain, and complete learning activities within a reasonable time frame. Similarly, many students with sensory disabilities must spend significantly more time just accessing information—whether through talking books, Braille, text, or sign language—than their nondisabled peers.
Education researchers, psychologists, and teachers agree that it is important for students to understand how their particular disability impacts their learning. Howard Gardner’s work on multiple intelligences encourages student self-identification of strengths, weaknesses, and preferences in different domains of learning: kinesthetic, logical, intrapersonal, visual/spatial, linguistic, interpersonal, musical, and naturalistic.11 Similarly, the All Kinds of Minds (AKOM) institute utilizes a series of“neurodevelopmental constructs” to provide teachers, students, and parents with a framework for understanding learning differences and their impact on behavior. PBS’ Misunderstood Minds website focuses on AKOM’s approach and offers resources for teachers, parents, and students, including interactive exercises that simulate what it is like to experience various reading, writing, math, and attention disorders.
Future brain research can potentially suggest personalized assessments that could measure varying levels of learning performance using different technology-enabled strategies at different stages in a student’s development. This would benefit all students but could prove game-changing for students with disabilities who face progressively complex challenges with keeping pace in an educational system that assumes a growing facility in reading, listening, and organizational skills. As these students progress through higher grades, they are asked to plan, organize, and complete reading, writing, and math assignments that take increasing amounts of time—and often require exactly the skills they lack. Technology can support the development of compensatory skills to accomplish these tasks and, ideally, to engage students in strengthening skills through regular and repeated use.

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