When completing an assignment for school or writing something technical for work, how many times have you wished for something to make the task more manageable and easier to complete?

Many students struggle with the writing components of curriculum and could benefit from writing supports to assist them with text production; organization of thoughts and information; and tools to aid with spelling, word retrieval, grammar and sentence construction.

There is legal basis for providing writing accommodations to students with disabilities on an IEP or a 504 plan.

The purpose of this course is to:

• provide information about accommodations
• explore some of the electronic writing aids available to help the struggling writer, including video of users and activities to try-out tools to produce text
• create a list of resources, websites and vendors

*****NOTE: To complete the activities in this course, participants will be asked to download some web-based writing tools to test out and evaluate. In addition, for other tools, instructions will be given to activate and test some of the accessibility functions in Microsoft Word - these are tools available as part of the MS Word program and simply need to be activated for use. As much as possible, the tools to test out are free web-based downloads, 30-day free trial opportunities or accessibility functions internal to the Microsoft Word program. You'll need a microphone to input text using speech recognition. Although a higher quality headset, with an integrated microphone, would give you the best results, even the internal microphone which is standard with some computer will work to test this software.

Minnesota Department of Education:

State Accountability Assessments

Types of Accommodations