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Is Personalized Learning Technology Reaching All Students?

March 31, 2016

How personalized learning technology can do more to support students with disabilities.

Personalized learning: a phrase that daily graces the pages of education blogs, news sites, and teacher prep textbooks; an increasingly popular topic for conference panels and PD sessions; and a buzzword across schools nationwide. It is even a trending hashtag on Twitter.

For all of its recent social clout, it is hardly new, and has been the bedrock of special education since its modern inception 40 years ago. The individual education plan (IEP), after all, is quite literally a document articulating a set of personalized goals and prescribing a plan for how these goals will be achieved through accommodations, special services, and teaching strategies uniquely tailored to a student’s strengths, interests, and areas of need.

Personalized learning is a favorite trend among edtech entrepreneurs, as their expertise is particularly hospitable to the data and devices that make personalized learning more manageable. As the concept of adaptive learning (an educational method which uses technology to modify the educational material presented to a student in response to their performance) has taken off, so has the ability for educators to automate personalized learning, at least to a certain degree.

Yet while personalized learning apps and other technology abound in general education, there is a well documented dearth of such technology in special education, where personalized learning ostensibly began and where such technology might make the most difference.

When it comes to personalized learning, special educators, specifically those working with children with severe cognitive impairments, face unique challenges in utilizing personalized learning technology.

  1. Technological literacy

    2. One issue special education teachers face when it comes to utilizing personalized learning technology in their classrooms is their students’ sometimes limited technological literacy. Unlike the majority of general education students, using personalized learning devices such as Chromebooks or IPads does not always come naturally to these students and can make applications designed to personalize learning inaccessible. And while assistive technology exists to resolve some of the issues stemming from a lack of technological literacy, access to assistive technology is far from guaranteed, and even when it is available, school personnel often lack the training they need to properly implement it. While some schools do an excellent job of implementing assistive technology, other schools, especially urban and rural schools sometimes lack it altogether. Additionally, personalized learning technology is not always designed to work with assistive technology.

  2. Age appropriate content

    3. One of the biggest complaints special educators have about personalized learning apps is a general lack of age appropriate content. High school special education teachers working with students with moderate/severe needs are particularly frustrated by this issue. They may have students reading at a first or second grade level, but the only content available to them at this level is for little kids.

    As one special education teacher put it in an article last year for EdSurge, “Many of the educational apps on the market are geared toward SPED students that are 1-2 grade levels below their peers–your ‘normal’ kids with some missing skills. Some are for students with decoding issues that need a reader (Kurzweil); some help with learning phonics sounds (Best Phonics Apps). Still others are for students that need a visual representation of Biology concepts (Best Bio Apps). There is even one that supports job skills (CAW) though data entry is a dying field.”

  3. Social emotional, not just academic content

    4. Much of what students with disabilities are being taught in school is not academic. In autism classrooms, for instance, teaching social skills to kids of all ages–from preK to transition–is a large part of what teachers spend their time on, and there are very few apps that give teachers the ability to do this in a personalized, adaptive way, especially for those teaching older students.

    There are, however, a few good tools on the market.

    • Stories2Learn allows teachers to create personalized stories for students using photos, text, and audio messages, which can be used for teaching social skills in a personalized way.
    • A similar app created by the same company helps teach students social skills through stories, which can be edited by adding custom text, photos, and audio for easy personalization.
    • QuickCues is social script app specifically designed for older students with ASD to learn social skills and adapt to new social situations. But for students who struggle with reading or abstract thinking, the app can prove challenging and may require the assistance of a teacher or adult. It also does little to engage students, as the interface is bland and the type small.

  4. Access and affordability

    5. While personalized learning technology options are limited for special education, there are some excellent tools on the market for supporting personalized learning for students with disabilities, such as Unique Learning Systems, TeachTown, Goalbook and Edmentum. The issue with all of these systems is cost, which in turn makes them inaccessible to teachers without district buy-in. They are nearly impossible to purchase as an individual teacher, so unless the district purchases these programs for teachers, they will not be able to utilize them in the classroom.

    And while the new funding structure under ESSA set aside what basically amounts to a large block grant to be used for education technology in schools, it is unlikely that this newly available funding stream will be used to purchase special education technology. Because special education technology is almost always purchased using IDEA funds, and IDEA remains significantly underfunded, teachers lacking access to such technology now are no more likely to gain access under ESSA.

 
In a better world, special education teachers would have access to all the assistive technology needed to make personalized learning technology accessible to all of their students; EdTech companies would create engaging content for all kinds of learners, including the small but significant number of high school students who are are reading at levels far below their peers, but are still interested in the same things other kids their age are interested in; the importance of teaching social skills to help all students, but especially those with disabilities, to live rich and meaningful lives, would be of equal priority to improving academic outcomes; and most importantly, individuals with disabilities would be treated as equals to their typically developing peers, and education policy, including how funding is allocated, would follow suit.

In the meantime, we can be grateful for the advances in special education technology that have been made, and grateful that education as a whole is grasping the importance of personalized learning. And until technology catches up with the needs of our students, we can continue, as we always have, to use our creativity, our brains and our passion to ensure that students with disabilities have access to the highest quality education possible.