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Penny Reed
You know I guess I’d like to end with talking about something that really needs to happen
and that I’m surprised has not happened in the last 20 years and that is that I still
see our teachers and therapists coming out of their undergraduate training programs or
even their graduate training programs not knowing as much as they should know about
assistive technology. And while we have some excellent examples of universities across
the country that are doing it the vast majority of teacher training programs, I would say
85 – 90% of them, don’t teach their graduates about assistive technology and that makes
me so sad. It’s been a law for 20 years and it’s not something that comes naturally
to someone. They do need some training. Not a great deal because our students going into
college now are very technologically savvy.
So they just need to know what those tools are. They can probably operate them quite
easily if someone just helps them understand what our federal law says.
And I’m hoping that somehow the field will step up. I know it takes time to change university
programs, but 20 years? We’ve had 20 years. Every graduate in special education, general
education, occupational therapy, speech and language pathology and school administration
should know what the law is and what the field of assistive technology is. They don’t need
to know how to operate all that stuff.
But they need to know the law and what that means to them because every individual who
works with children with disabilities has a role to play. It isn’t just that AT specialist,
it’s that classroom teacher. We know from all of the research there is that abandonment
happens because the AT doesn’t fulfill a meaningful need for the user.
It’s only the classroom teacher that can create those daily opportunities to use AT
in a meaningful way. The speech therapist can’t do it when she comes once a week or
once a month and neither can any other specialist. It’s got to be right there as part of their
every day lives. So that means everybody has to understand it and I hope for the future
is that somehow we will get there. That it will become so pervasive in our lives that
AT will be ubiquitous.