Photos by Alan Magayne-Roshak

SMART Board technology that Roman Pikula uses at Vincent High School helps give students using wheelchairs better access to learning activities.

One SMART Board is placed against a classroom wall; another is on a stand and accessible to students using wheelchairs.

Technology has become an important education tool, particularly for students who face learning challenges.

A University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UWM) professor is a national leader in the field of developing and using what is called “assistive technology” to help teachers reach students who might have difficulty with more traditional classroom materials and methods.

Dave Edyburn, professor of exceptional education in UWM’s School of Education, researches ways to use and adapt technology to enhance teaching, learning and performance. He’s written more than 150 articles and textbook chapters on the topic, as well as a number of books, and is president of the Special Education Technology Special Interest Group of the International Society for Technology in Education. In addition, he is co-principal investigator on a federally funded project exploring the use of assistive technology in higher education.

Edyburn also teaches courses in the use of assistive technology, helping UWM graduates bring innovative teaching techniques to their classrooms. For example, Roman Pikula, a recent graduate who studied with Edyburn, is putting what he learned at UWM into practice at Harold S. Vincent High School, where he teaches in the orthopedically and cognitively impaired special education unit.

Dave Edyburn uses this graphic of the achievement gap at workshops to illustrate why the use of technology is important. The diagonal line represents the goal of grade-level achievement mandated by No Child Left Behind legislation. The lower line represents the chronic underachievement of four groups of students (students with disabilities, students of color, students of poverty and English Language Learners) that No Child Left Behind uses to calculate whether a school district or state has made adequate yearly progress (AYP).

For the past two years, Pikula has used SMART Board technology in his classroom, which includes students with severe disabilities. “These students are medically fragile,” Pikula says. “They have medical conditions with their multiple disabilities.”

The SMART Board technology helps them access the materials that other students use. “You need to use technology; there is no other way,” Pikula says.

The technology in his classroom was funded through a $16,000 grant from the Helen Bader Foundation in Milwaukee.

SMART Boards: How they work

One 71-inch SMART Board is placed against a classroom wall. The second 48-inch SMART Board is on a stand and accessible to students using wheelchairs. 

Students use the technology for different activities, such as graphic organizing, reading and writing, Web searches, geography and counting. 

His students like the SMART Boards, says Pikula. “They were very excited. The main thing that we achieved with the students was just having that access,” Pikula said. “We didn’t have the technology before, and they [the students] felt like secondary citizens. Now we have people coming to us, watching us; how we do things – imagine how they feel now.”

Reading books was a challenge for the students before Pikula introduced the SMART Boards to the classroom because students have a hard time using their hands and can’t turn the pages. The technology takes away the difficulty of turning pages so the student can enjoy the book, both hearing it read and seeing the print much enlarged. (SMART Boards allow teachers to transmit material from a computer, including sound. If the computer is equipped with text-to-speech software, this effect can be simulated on the projected screen.)

 The technology, which allows him to incorporate various graphics and real-life pictures, also helps increase the students’ comprehension of the materials.

Universal Design for Learning

Edyburn also works with technology to help students learn through Universal Design for Learning (UDL).

“It [UDL] helps us develop new strategies for diverse learners who have been marginalized by the achievement gap – students with disabilities, students of color, students of poverty and English language learners. Those four groups have not been historically successful in school. So these kinds of techniques allow us to value that diversity and engage them in ways that we couldn’t do with traditional media,” Edyburn says.

For example, he has developed a Web page called “Using Tic-Tac-Toe to Manage Differentiated Instruction.” He didn’t develop the concept, but is using the Internet to make it more widely available to teachers. Tic-Tac-Toe, which can be adapted to different grade levels, is a three-by-three grid. Teachers can fill in the boxes on the grid with different activities. The students’ goal is to complete three activities in a row from the nine that teachers set up.

Students have a wide range of activities to choose from. It’s not just read a book and then take a test, says Edyburn. “The activity the student chooses could be drawing a picture, visiting a Website, doing all these kinds of things. We’re giving the teachers a management tool to address diversity in the classroom.”

Teachers around the country are benefiting from Edyburn’s work in Universal Design for Learning. For example, Edyburn has been training UDL teams in Indiana for three years. In August, a teaching team from Columbus, Ind., which was involved in the UDL project, took top honors at a Microsoft Forum for Innovative Teachers. Their winning entry was based on an adaptation of Tic-Tac-Toe to a lesson on the Industrial Revolution. The teachers will travel to Brazil in November for Microsoft’s international competition. 

“AutoSummarize”

Another existing tool Edyburn has adapted to help students is the “AutoSummarize” feature in Microsoft Word. (Located in the “Tools” menu bar.)

An illustration of the AutoSummarize feature,using this story, shows how a student or teacher can use Microsoft Word to help pick out key points in written material.

 Edyburn discovered students with disabilities could apply the “AutoSummarize” feature to help them learn material. 

Here’s how it works: A student looking at paragraphs of text on a Website and having difficulty understanding the reading can copy the text from the Website into a Microsoft Word document.

Using the “AutoSummarize” feature, the student can then choose a type of summary – for example, “Highlight key points.” Word then highlights the key portions of the text, helping students get to the “meat” of the article quickly.

“It [AutoSummarize] will analyze the document and say, ‘This is the most important information in the whole article,’” Edyburn explains.

The amount of text highlighted depends on the percentage that the student chooses. For example, if the student chooses 10 percent and “Highlight key points,” Word will choose the most important 10 percent of the text related to those key points.

“The point is that this gives them access,” Edyburn says. “Before, the book stayed in the locker and they didn’t do anything. So even if they’re only getting 10 percent of the content, it’s the most important 10 percent, and it’s more than they got before.”

(This feature was adapted from an article by Emily Cain, communications intern, that ran in the School of Education’s Annual Report 2007-2008.)