Why digital technology enables ALL students to be successful.

Powerful digital multimodal technology is now widely used around the world but education has failed so far to embrace this completely. It is essential that this technology is harnessed and embedded into the curriculum in the very best way possible, so more students can be more successful and creative.
Good quality teaching and learning have to be studied and the new digital technologies evaluated so only the very best is used. Education needs to capitalise on all the diverse strengths of the digital technology as its use enables more students especially those who have difficulties, be more successful.
Multi-modal digital technology will be looked at in more detail to see how it can make such a significant differences to learning, especially for students who struggle with literacy. Some state of the art multimodal technology will be demonstrated .
• Differentiated instruction and easier literacy learning much easier –absolutely essential
• Talking text –writing can be spoken as the text is typed Textease.
• Pictures, animations, text can all be an integral part of the produced work eg in Textease
• Voice recognition technology not just for writing but to improve reading eg Rapid Reading Assistant
• Students recording to help them master spelling , important facts, to dictate and then write about using the dictation as a prompt in Textease , Wordshark
• Words, sentences can be highlighted easily and with speech.
• Work can be planned using software such as Inspiration , Textease
• It can provide students who find reading difficult an alternative means of accessing text by listening; it is even better with pictures. TextHELP! Textease
• Most digital enhancement is beneficial to students ie. a timeline, pictures, animation, colour and text using all senses is more efficient and therefore there is more, often far more, success .

These three programs below have made a huge impact on students’ learning due to the digital diversity of the software and its ability to import sound and text through the flip camera, microphone plus the Docupen.

Textease: A very powerful multimodal writing and publishing program which privides outstanding language support by reading aloud any text, alows students o record,has a friendly spell checker and great visual support so providing scaffolding in many different ways for learning for ALL students.

Rapid Reading Assistant: A supportive and personalised reading program of unique voice recognition software so enabling poor readers to catch up with their peers.

Wordshark: A brilliant program in which students learn spelling better than in any other way, and they have fun. It uses 55 carefully designed games to teach and reinforce reading and spelling .

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