A+TBI+Student+Can+Blog

**A TBI STUDENT CAN BLOG**
Traumatic brain injury (TBI), also known as intracranial injury, occurs when an external force [|traumatically injures] the [|brain] (Wikipedia). The effects on the student’s learning depend on what part of the brain was injured. The occipital lobe affects vision, the frontal lobe affects attention, organization, planning and much more, the temporal lobe affects memory and sequencing and the occipital lobe controls motor activity and coordination.

A student with TBI may find it difficult to create and maintain a class blog due to problems with fine motor skills. Providing assistive technology (AT) will decrease the student’s frustration, increase efficiency and reduce the level of exertion, which will save the student cognitive and physical energy for learning the curriculum.

Susan Paradise discusses different assistive technologies ranging from low tech to high tech. She provides examples in her article, //An Introduction to Assistive Technology for Students with Brain Injuries,// ranging from ataxia, hearing, vision and most any disability encountered by these TBI students. For a student experiencing ataxia, accessing a social networking site or blogging may be difficult but with proper speech to text software, keyboard covers, and adaptive hardware and software they will be able to communicate as well as other students. The computer's control panel has an accessibility option to keep the keys from repeating.

Websitetips.com provides an array of technology available for the disabled. There is a link to JAWS for screen reading software so the students can view other blogs. There are several tools available to check sites for disabled accessibility, such as aDesigner. For capturing screen shots or adding photos to blogs try snagit. Snagit also captures screens with clickable links intact and editable text, saves captured screenshots to a variety of formats, and does image editing. This will easily capture pictures, has video capacity and text editing and will group pictures together in a scrolling window. Even simple editing can be problematic for those with ataxia, so this technology makes blogging possible for all students.

[] [] by Susan Paradise [] [] [] []