Introduction
This student who is in Y11 in secondary school has just been diagnosed with dyslexia. She has managed in school up to this point but her English teacher was concerned about the mismatch between her oral and written work. She has found it increasingly difficult to keep up in class. Assessments have shown that she has difficulties with single word reading, needing to re-read texts to make sense of them, spelling and punctuation, adequate speed of handwriting,visual disturbances, planning and memory.
A plan for support is listed below.
Reading
The school should join Load2Learn ( www.load2learn.org.uk ) which is a free service providing accessible textbooks and images to support dyslexic, partially sighted or blind learners who have difficulty reading standard print. The student finds larger spacing helpful when reading and this is available.
As the school already has the SOLO 6 suite of programmes (www.donjohnston.com/products/solo) the student can also have access to Read:OutLoud 6 which is an independent text reader that works with any electronic text including the Web. It can be used to capture main ideas and supporting details in an outline and create notes to make personal connections or responses. This will also help with her planning difficulties. It will also enable her to read pages easily from the internet.
For home use I have suggested that she downloads MyStudyBar (www.eduapps.org) which is a portable app that will support her reading and writing difficulties. She can then use Orato which is the text reader. It also contains Balabolka which will allow her to convert text to MP3 format so that she can listen to texts or documents.
She will now use a blue reading overlay for texts which have not been converted. MyStudyBar has various options to help with visual stress, T-Bar Colour, Vu-Bar and ssOverlay.
Writing
The SOLO6 suite contains Write:OutLoud 6 which is an easy-to-use talking word processor with revising and editing supports. The student will get auditory feedback as she types. It also contains Co:Writer which is a writing assistant with linguistic word prediction, designed to help students write complete and correct sentences with rich vocabulary, correctly spelled words, and very few keystrokes. It is usually used in combination with another application, such as a word processor or an e-mail program.Both these programmes will support her writing, spelling and planning difficulties.
For home use she can use LetMeType in MyStudyBar which has a predictive word facility. Balabolka is also available which allows the student to momitor their writing process as it reads back exactly what has been typed.
Tiny Spell is a spell checker which is also useful.
For her hadwriting difficulties she will have access to the LiveScribe pen in 6th form to assist her in taking notes. For now, school have suggested that she use Dragon on an iPad which they will lend to her. These will be useful to alleviate her short-term memory difficulties.
A selection of cue Cards (www.load2learn.org.uk) from Load2Learn which show keyboard shortcuts will be useful to increase her writing productivity.
Planning
The student will be shown how to use Draft:Builder 6 from SOLO6 which is an organizing tool that breaks down the writing process into manageable chunks to structure planning, organizing, note taking and draft writing. It will create an outline and notes to organize thoughts, write a first draft using the student’s outlines and notes and give auditory feedback as she types.
For home use she can use Xmind on MyStudyBar. It is similar to the well-known Inspiration.
Memory
A dictaphone can be supplied by the school and this can be a useful support for a poor working memory.
Other useful supports
Students with dyslexia often struggle to develop vocabulary because they don’t meet new words through reading. It would be useful to try to encourage the use of talking or audio books available from Librivox (www.librivox.org) who offer free audio books, www.audible.co.uk who have a great selection of books and also through listening to podcasts.
Dropbox (www.dropbox.com) is a free service that allows you to share documents immediately online. This is a useful way to be able to access homework even if the physical copy has been left at home.
www.load2learn.org.uk has lots of really useful support and training which will support the staff working with this student.
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