Back to School: Technology

I’m frequently fascinated by stories of individuals with disabilities using technology to further their education. Videos of valedictorians using assisted communication devices to deliver their grad speeches or university students using the same programs to defend theses leave me speechless.

Parents, and even younger individuals, often ask me what I used in school and share about their aides of choice. Things have definitely changed since I started school!

To assist with writing, I was trained on a computer from about six years old in the first grade. Each day, we had to write something in a journal. While everyone was writing in theirs, I would go to a computer lab with my aide and type mine. I’m not sure about the other kids, but my journal entries almost always detailed some fantastic story about monsters, prehistoric beasts, or cartoon and video game characters coming to life!

Case in point

Around Grade 5, I started using a computer for more serious work like book reports and other assignments. Two years later, in junior high school, I was given an electric type writer to assist with my work. I took it between school and home, and was responsible for getting my work printed before class. Failure to do so meant no work, which meant a detention, so I got in a habit very quick!

In high school, I was the first student in the area to be provided with a laptop (the Acer pictured above), which would help with homework and many essays. This was in 1999.

At the time, some people thought that would give me an unfair advantage. On one hand, being the only student in the entire area with such a device, I can sort of see where they were coming from. On the other, the laptop’s contents included Word, Excel, PowerPoint, an Encarta CD, Pac-man, and Dig Dug, and not much else, so it wasn’t like I was going to be able to hack into the school or anything.

I did receive a couple “upgrades” over the years, though: my Art and Comm-tech (think computer art/design) teachers convinced the school to provide me with Corel Draw, and as a reward for getting good grades one years, my parents bought me some Star Wars game demos! That’s right, DEMOS!

Later in college, I got my own laptop (with much more on it than the last). Many of my teachers used eLearing and uploaded notes, presentations, and documents to an online location, so I didn’t need to worry about writing all that much. I did experiment with Dragon Naturally Speaking, a program that converted my speech to text in a document. Fairly useful for assignments requiring info-dumping, but not for much else, at least in my experience.

That's the gist of my technology story. Pretty dated stuff by today's standards, but I guess I was a pioneer of sorts. If this was twenty to almost thirty years ago, it'll be interesting to see how much tech develops in the next couple decades.

Cheers!