For Makenzie Gilkison, spelling is such a struggle that a word like rhinoceros can sound like “rineanswsaurs” or sarcastic like “srkastik.”
The 14-year-old from the suburbs of Indianapolis can pronounce words, but her dyslexia makes the process so exhausting that she often struggles to understand. “I just thought I was stupid,” she recalls of her early elementary school years.
But assistive technology powered by artificial intelligence helped her keep up with her classmates. Last year, Makenzie was named to the National Junior Honor Society. She credits a personalized AI-powered chatbot, a word prediction program, and other tools that can read for her.
“I probably would have given up if I didn’t have them,” she said.
Artificial intelligence promises to help countless other students with various visual, speech, language and hearing disabilities to perform tasks which come easily to others. Schools around the world are grappling with how and where to integrate AIbut many are expedited applications for students with disabilities.
Getting the latest technology into the hands of students with disabilities is a priority of the U.S. Department of Education, which has told schools they must consider whether students need tools such as text-to-speech and alternative communication devices. The Justice Department’s new rules will also require schools and other government entities to create apps and accessible online content to people with disabilities.
There are concerns about how to ensure that students who use it – including those with disabilities – continue to learn.
Students can use artificial intelligence to summarize confusing thoughts into an outline, summarize complicated passages, or even translate Shakespeare into everyday English. And computer-generated voices, capable of reading passages intended for visually impaired and dyslexic students, are becoming less robotic and more natural.
“I find that a lot of students are exploring on their own, almost feeling like they’ve found a cheat code in a video game,” said Alexis Reid, a Boston-area educational therapist who works with students. students with learning disabilities. But according to her, it is far from being cheating: “We meet students where they are. »
Ben Snyder, a 14-year-old freshman from Larchmont, New York, who was recently diagnosed with a learning disability, is increasingly using AI to help him with his homework.
“Sometimes in math, my teachers will explain a problem to me, but it makes absolutely no sense,” he said. “So if I plug this problem into AI, it will give me several different ways to explain how to do this.”
He likes a program called Question AI. Earlier in the day, he asked the program to help him write an outline for a book report – a task he completed in 15 minutes that otherwise would have taken him an hour and a half due to his writing and organizational difficulties. But he thinks using AI to write the entire report crosses the line.
“It’s just cheating,” Ben said.
Schools have tried to balance the benefits of technology with the risk of it overdoing it. If a special education plan sets growth in reading as a goal, the student must improve this skill. AI can’t do it for them, said Mary Lawson, general counsel at the Council of the Great City Schools.
But technology can help level the playing field for students with disabilities, said Paul Sanft, director of a Minnesota-based center where families can try different assistive technology tools and borrow devices.
“There will certainly be people who use some of these tools in nefarious ways. This will always happen,” Sanft said. “But I don’t think that’s the biggest concern for people with disabilities, who are just trying to do something they couldn’t do before.”
Another risk is that AI will follow students to less rigorous courses of study. And because it’s so good for identify patternsAI might be able to determine that a student has a disability. Having this disclosed by AI and not the student or their family could create ethical dilemmas, said Luis Pérez, head of disability and digital inclusion at the Center for Accessible Technology.
Schools are using technology to help students who are struggling academically, even if they don’t qualify for special education services. In Iowa, a new law requires students deemed incompetent — about a quarter of them — to follow an individualized reading plan. As part of that effort, the state Department of Education spent $3 million on an AI-powered personalized tutoring program. When students struggle, a digital avatar steps in.
More AI tools will be available soon.
The US National Science Foundation funds AI research and development. A company develops tools to help children with speech and language difficulties. Called the National AI Institute for Exceptional Education, it is headquartered at the University at Buffalo, which has done pioneering work on handwriting recognition that helped the U.S. Postal Service save hundreds of millions of dollars by automating the treatment.
“We are able to solve the postal application with very high precision. When it comes to children’s handwriting, we are failing badly,” said Venu Govindaraju, director of the institute. He sees this as an area that needs more work, as does text-to-speech technology, which is not as effective at understanding children’s voices, especially those with speech disorders.
Sort through the large number of programs developed by educational technology companies can be a time-consuming challenge for schools. Richard Culatta, CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education, said the nonprofit launched an effort this fall to make it easier for districts to verify what they are purchasing and ensure that it is accessible.
Makenzie wishes some tools were easier to use. Sometimes a feature will be inexplicably disabled and it will be left without that feature for a week while the tech team investigates. The challenges can be so overwhelming that some students resist technology altogether.
But Makenzie’s mother, Nadine Gilkison, who works as a technology integration supervisor at the Franklin Township Community School Corporation in Indiana, said she sees more promise than downside.
In September, his district deployed chatbots to help high school students in special education. She said teachers, who sometimes struggled to provide students with the help they needed, became emotional when they heard about the program. Until now, students were dependent on someone to help them, unable to move forward on their own.
“Now we don’t have to wait,” she said.
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