Upper Level Mechanical Skills

Automaticity of lower level skills

In short, automaticity at this point is the process of making automatic all of the lower level skills. “If letter production is automatic, memory space is freed up for higher level composing processes, such as deciding what to write about, what to say and how to say it.” (http://www.ldanh.org/docs/writestuff.pdf)

According to http://www.learninginfo.org/automaticity.htm automaticity “is usually the result of learning, repetition, and practice. The main process by which we develop automaticity is called overlearning (also called overtraining). Overlearning is a pedagogical concept according to which newly acquired skills should be practiced well beyond the point of initial mastery, leading to automaticity.” In other words, everything we can do to engage students in practicing their skills is developing their ability to make them automatic.

Integration of lower level skills with content, Grammar, Semantics (clear and appropriate word usage), and Speed of motor performances   

Low Tech

Pencil to paper. Despite the many places in the writing process where the process can break down, for many, pencil and paper is still the lowest tech method of completing a writing task with or without the assistive technologies named elsewhere in this blog.  It may also be the slowest or not possible. In those cases, look to the mid to high tech options for writing with speed and have the best opportunity to make use of the skills a student does have.

High Tech

Clicker5 or Clicker6

Clicker5 and its updated version, Clicker6, are software choices for the computer which allow the elementary aged student word choice. Students can choose from words and pictures to construct their sentences. If they are uncertain about the words they can choose from, they can listen to the word being spoken.







Typ-O HD is a word prediction app for the iPad/iPhone. Three levels of assistance from comonly misspelled words to phonetic spelling. One review from a teacher who is also dyslexic felt that its best use is as a spell checker. Click here for that article.

Dragon Products

As one blogger titled their article about Dragon Dictation, "The Dragon Dictation App Will Turn Your iPad Into a Cheap Secretary". Speech to text recognition software has come a long way from where it began. This app on your handheld device is useful for anyone who can enunciate clearly but can't get to a keyboard.

On the computer, the larger, more sophisicated (and expensive) Dragon Speech Recognition Software supports many forms of written output (emails, word processing documents, and more) to all be controlled by voice commands.




CoWriter - Don Johnston

CoWriter is a more advanced form of word prediction software that can work with many word processing softwares.

 

Improv

Building on CoWriter, Don Johnston also brings Improv which adds in phrase recognition as well as word recognition.

Kurzweil 3000

Not just a reading tool, Kurzweil 3000 can be used as a writing tool as well.