NotesFAQContact Us
Collection
Advanced
Search Tips
50 Years of ERIC
50 Years of ERIC
The Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) is celebrating its 50th Birthday! First opened on May 15th, 1964 ERIC continues the long tradition of ongoing innovation and enhancement.

Learn more about the history of ERIC here. PDF icon

Back to results
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
ERIC Number: EJ729608
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2004
Pages: 10
Abstractor: ERIC
Reference Count: 68
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0162-6434
Creating a Technology Toolkit for Students with Mental Retardation: A Systematic Approach
Parette, Phil; Wojcik, Brian W.
Journal of Special Education Technology, v19 n4 p23-32 Fall 2004
In 1991, the Association for Retarded Citizens (ARC) of the United States issued a position statement stating that assistive technology (AT) could be a useful tool for individuals with mental retardation. The Division on Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities of the Council for Exceptional Children published a position statement recognizing that "persons with mental retardation and developmental disabilities at all age levels and across cultures may benefit for assistive technology devices and services" (Parette, 1997, p. 267). One promising solution to assist educational professionals in effective AT consideration and implementation that has been reported by Edyburn and Gardener (1998) is the concept of an AT toolkit. Edyburn (2000) has described an AT toolkit as a collection of tools that (a) is targeted to meet the performance demands of a given population, (b) focuses on appropriate tools to enhance a user's performance rather than on the cost of a piece of technology, (c) effectively allows educational professionals to make informed choices from a set of probable tool solutions rather than an overwhelming set of products available on the market, and (d) is portable and readily available for the use in the classroom. An AT toolkit is a proactive strategy to assist in meeting the needs of students with disabilities by allowing the technologies within the toolkit to be quickly placed in the hands of both teachers and students fostering exploratory use (Edyburn, 2000). Unfortunately, there is little available evidence of background development activities that provide a sound foundation for the creation of AT toolkits. Watts, Thompson, and Wojcik (2003, 2004) proposed a method to systematically create an AT toolkit and offered a preliminary toolkit targeted for students with developmental disabilities. Basically, this approach involved soliciting tool suggestions from teachers in the field about useful technologies for particular groups of students and then ranking the suggested list from most useful to least useful. This process would culminate in a final sorted list that provides a field-based, practitioner-supported foundation for the creation of the toolkit. This article extends the work previously reported by Watts, Thompson, and Wojcik (2003, 2004), but focuses specifically on the creation of a toolkit designed for use with students with mental retardation.
Technology and Media Division of the Council for Exceptional Children, University of Oklahoma, College of Education, 820 Van Vleet Oval, Norman, OK 73072. Web site: http://jset.unlv.edu.
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers: Individuals with Disabilities Education Act; United States; Illinois