Hello everyone! We are the adaptive learning tools team- Amina Farah, Jeremy Sheeshka, Laila Kasim-Parkinson and Emily Douglass. Bringing together our experience in education and youth work, our focus was on adaptive technology and their application to Individual Education Plans (IEPs) specifically focusing on integrated adaptive learning and assistive technology.
On our site you will encounter the following topics
- What is adaptive learning?
- What tools and tech currently exists
- The gaps we see
- A market analysis
- Educational Implications
In addition to this, there will also be integrative participation and engagement activities throughout the pages for you to complete and give you a space to write out thoughts
Got a critique, a burning question, or a random brainstorm? Toss it right here in this comment section. Our team will be hanging out here all week to chat and keep the conversation moving.
We’ll be dropping fresh questions and prompts in the comments over the next few days, so keep your eyes peeled! In fact, Emily has already left our very first prompt right below this post.
CLICK HERE FOR THE LINK TO OUR SITE
Hello! To kick off our week, think back to your own school days, or look at the classrooms/youth spaces you work in now. Can you think of a specific moment where a student (or maybe you!) were struggling, and a piece of tech or a tool completely turned things around? Or flip side—a time when the lack of the right tool made things incredibly frustrating?
In just a sentence or two, tell us what that tool was (or what was missing).
No right or wrong answers here, just want to see what kind of learning tools have actually made an impact!
As a classroom teacher, having a Remote Microphone System (formerly called an FM System), has been a great technology tool to use when I have students who are hard of hearing in the classroom. I noticed when I would not use it for these students, they would miss parts of the lesson, or seem more confused in the classroom. Having this tool available helps these kids engage with the materials at hand, and follow along with the teachers lesson so it’s crucial to have these technological adaptations for students!
In one of my previous schools, there was a non-verbal student who it was very difficult to communicate with. The school obtained a device that allowed them to press a button to say a word, and they started interacting way more with their classmates and other teachers. In this way, the technology opened up their world and allowed them to do things they were not capable of before.
Sometimes when the projector bulb in a room gets older, it starts to get blurry and more difficult to see what’s on the screen. When this happens I worry about my students, especially those who are in the back of the room.
Students who used speech-to-text or even typing as an alternative sometimes benefited from using this technology. Oftentimes, they just had a hard time getting their ideas down on paper, even though they had many ideas in their heads. They were able to verbalize them, but spelling and penmanship created barriers to writing. This technology alleviated that stress and allowed them to enjoy writing more.
One piece of tech that made a huge difference for me as a teacher seems quite basic now, but it was when we got our first projectors in class.
Prior to that, anything that I wanted to share with the whole class simultaneously had to be printed (resource-inefficient and wasteful) or handwritten on the board (time-consuming, no option to do so during lesson prep). Video materials were limited to whatever we had DVDs for.
Getting a projector connected to a PC on the teachers table was transformative. It made lessons more engaging, saved a ton of paper, and allowed me to prepare more of my lessons the night before.
PS – The link to your OER isn’t currently working 🙂
Thank you for your comment! I remember projectors being introduced more regularly in classrooms since late elementary school and their development since then and now as a teacher having this is truly so great for the classroom and lesson prep!
PS: Thank you for the heads-up! It should be working now!
This has already been mentioned, but I want to second the overhead projector. Before I had one, I used a projector that had to be wheeled around the classroom with cords running across the floor. It was cumbersome to set up and easy to knock over, making it difficult to use at times.
Now, with an overhead projector and screen mirroring, teaching is much more efficient. I can easily show videos, model lessons, and display resources from my computer.
I would also add that my document camera is one of the most useful tools I use as a classroom teacher. It allows me to demonstrate concepts, such as addition with regrouping, so all students can clearly see the process on the screen. Instead of crowding around to watch, students can stay engaged from their seats and follow along easily.
What a flashback! Your description reminded me of sitting behind an overhead projector in class, with the head of it sticking up just enough to block whatever was on screen. It’s interesting how one piece of tech can shape classroom dynamics through both what it brings and what it replaces. For me, that probably meant missing notes off the board and having to copy a friend’s, or copy straight off the transparency sheet itself. Thankfully I never had to deal with an overhead projector much in my teaching career, just digital ones on carts with all sorts of cumbersome cables and adapters.
I’d say the bit of technology that I am almost always fighting with is AV stuff! Whether it’s a wireless dongle not working properly to allow me to use my projector, or the black-box experience that is audio I/O, I feel like I’m always either double-checking my audio I/O before a class starts, or paying the price for forgetting to
That being said, when the AV is correctly set up in a room, it feels like a super-power. Having up-to-date in-ceiling speakers that connect to both the teachers devices AND a FrontRow or similar technology to save the teachers voice makes a massive difference for learners and the teacher alike, and it’s usually not until you’ve had the privilege of experience a well thought-out set-up that you realize what you’ve been missing.
I can’t recount how many times I’ve had to remind students to make active decisions to position themselves to see and/or hear what is going on better. But then, that usually takes a back-seat to making sure they’re seated with their peers.
Tech completely turning things around…Just this past week a neurodivergent student was working with a new IESW (support worker) and the IESW allowed the student to work on an iPad. Unfortunately, the student started to view videos he was not supposed to be watching and that is when things turned around. The student refused to do another activity, and continued to watch videos he should not have been. This eventually resulted in the student attacking staff, ruining art work, and damaging school property. Sometimes it is the tech that can cause “things to turn around” and not in a positive way.
That doesn’t sound very fun. Thank you for sharing this though! This speaks to the messier side of the implementation of technology amongst students and how tech can backfire fast if classroom management goes awry. I think there’s a point here with how it’s important to keep boundaries, expectations and routines clear, because technology itself as a tool is only ever as good as the structure it’s used within. For some, maybe that means the way it’s accessed matters just as much as whether they have access at all?
20+ years ago, I had a deaf classmate in a research course. She had interpreters in class (and the prof had to be continually reminded to not walk in front of them so their line of site with the her was not blocked), but outside of class she had no human or technological supports. We worked on a project together and settled on a system where she would communicate to me by writing on a notepad and I would communicate to her by typing on the computer (my handwriting is borderline indecipherable). It worked well enough but it meant we could only meet in the computer lab because this in ancient times was before everyone had laptops.
Now we could share a Google doc or use speech to text to communicate, and no doubt there are purpose-built apps that help deaf and hearing people communicate more easily, but at the time she had to do a lot of extra work just to engage in conversations with classmates that I took for granted.
One simple example from my JK classroom started with a student who was born without an optic chiasm, which significantly impacted their visual processing and made it difficult to see details in illustrations during whole-group read-alouds. To support that student, I began using an iPad on a stand as a live document camera and AirPlaying the book to the SmartBoard while reading in real time.
What started as an accommodation for one learner quickly became a UDL strategy that benefits everyone. Now all students can see illustrations, writing demonstrations, manipulatives, counting activities, and drawings up close, regardless of where they are sitting in the room. A simple adaptive technology solution designed for one student ended up improving access and engagement for the entire class.
One of the portfolio pieces of my current role is supporting assistive technology across my school division. I often see the greatest impact from tools that are not particularly flashy. For example, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and annotation tools such as Read&Write and OrbitNote can dramatically improve a student’s ability to access grade-level content and demonstrate their learning. When those supports are unavailable, the barriers become very visible. The technology itself is not doing the learning for the student; it is helping remove barriers that might otherwise prevent them from fully participating in the learning experience.
Well put. Some of the best tools out there are the ones that do a single thing and do it well. You’ve got me thinking about what text-to-speech and speech-to-text tooling might look like in my grade 3 classroom next year. Neat idea, too, if I could even set up a talk-to-text station of some kind? It’d be genuinely useful for journals and spelling support, but many students are still at that “brave spelling” stage, where sounding out letters and thinking through spelling is half the battle. I imagine there’s a huge spectrum of use cases depending on the learner and their needs. Simple tools like these seem to be quite adaptable, though I suppose that while for some it removes a barrier, for others it might remove part of the learning process itself.
There’s been some great stories and points here so far. Just out of curiosity: if you could make ONE recurring task or chore you have to do every day happen automatically, be it at work, home, or the classroom, what would you pick? Would you trust this task to be automated? Reply below!
Okay, nerd alert: The one everyday task I would automate would be cooking. I want a Star Trek-style food replicator, and I would definitely trust that because it worked for Picard – https://youtu.be/8kw9_O10Fh8?si=29T4DYB1GsbbERXw
I mean, if I didn’t have to think about all the ethical implications of space travel and synthetic food production.
For me, it would definitely be cleaning and organizing – both at home and in the classroom. Staying organized is something I constantly struggle to keep up with, especially at school. My classroom cupboard is a complete mess, but finding the time to sort through and organize everything is another story!
If I could automate one task, it would be having everything magically cleaned, tidied, and put back in its proper place. I would absolutely trust that task to be automated. It would save so much time and make my day-to-day life a lot less stressful.
Honestly, something I’ve been thinking about lately that would help in my work as a private math instructor with diverse learners is having my in-session notes automatically synthesized, especially when conducting learning assessments, into cognitive-level inferences that go beyond surface-level knowledge gaps to capture things like working memory bottlenecks, attentional patterns, and learning profiles, informing whole-child instructional design. This would help address the pain point of finer diagnostic texture getting lost in translation between the session observations and the documentation and planning that follows.
I’d trust automation to synthesize those inferences for me to review and curate, but would prefer the observations and educator intuition informing them to remain primarily mine, with session recordings only used with consent.
I immediately thought about attendance, but not because taking attendance is difficult.
I’d automate everything that happens after attendance is submitted. One entry could automatically notify the kitchen that a student with an allergy is absent, let outside providers like OT or speech know they don’t need to pull the student, update specialist teachers’ class lists before French or Music, notify after-school care or transportation, and generate an accurate emergency roster.
I would absolutely trust this kind of automation because it isn’t replacing professional judgment, it’s eliminating repetitive coordination between disconnected systems.
When I was teaching Grade 3 I had a young lady who recently received cochlear implants. While her hearing was significantly improced she still had a major disconnect with peers and still had difficulty staying attuned with learning. They brought in a ALD microphone that I would wear around my neck and it made a world of difference. Her attention was able to be focused with the clear input and almost as importantly her classmates developed a healthy curiosity about the microphone. This lead to a significant amount of learning opportunities. So much so that the young lady brought in experts and even her doctor to present how cochlear implants worked. From then on students were polite in asking to utilize the microphone for her sake and the classroom community fully embraced the technology.
It is not just about how the technology interacts with the student but how it brings those around together in understanding on these complicated issues. In my circumstance, the young lady developed such a resounding sense of personal agency from the application of this technology that she was able to build upon her leadership capabilities.
I really like the idea of LALT because it supports personalized learning in a more bottom-up way. Instead of having the instructor or institution decide which platforms and learning methods students should use, this model allows students’ strengths, weaknesses, and preferences to shape how they access and acquire knowledge. In that sense, LALT could support a flipped learning experience, where technology helps adapt learning around the student rather than forcing every student into the same structure.
That said, I think progress monitoring and access equity would be very important. Tech-savvy students may be able to find, combine, and benefit from learning tools more quickly than their peers, which could place less digitally confident students at a disadvantage. Assessment would also need to evolve alongside personalized learning. For example, if a student relies on writing-assistant software, educators may need more targeted writing assessments to evaluate whether that tool is actually improving the student’s learning strategy.
Overall, I think LALT has strong potential, but as the authors pointed out, managing multiple learning supports while still allowing meaningful personalization would require significant educational resources, especially during the early implementation stage.
One assistive technology that has made a big difference in my classroom is the translation feature on our iPads. I have several ELL students, and when they need clarification, we often use Google Translate to help explain instructions or vocabulary. What’s been especially nice is that classmates will sometimes use the translation feature as well to help their peers understand a task. It has become a simple way to support communication and build a more inclusive classroom.
For the automation question, I’d choose marking math drills. Imagine if students could quickly scan their completed worksheet, have the program identify any mistakes, and then make their own corrections before handing it in. It would save teachers a lot of time while giving students immediate feedback and another opportunity to learn from their errors.
I work in higher ed so a large part of my role is facilitating large events like open houses and hosting presenters. When everything is set up properly (the projector, slides, microphone, and presentation clicker) the session runs smoothly and the speaker can focus on engaging with the audience instead of worrying about the technology. I’ve also experienced the opposite, where AV issues or missing equipment created unnecessary stress and interrupted the flow of the presentation. It is very stressful when it happens!
Thank you for the clear and thoughtful OER. I appreciated how your group connected adaptive learning tools to IEPs, integrated adaptive learning, and assistive technology. This made the topic feel practical and directly connected to real learner needs.
I found the focus on gaps especially useful because it moved the discussion beyond simply listing tools that already exist. It encouraged a more critical look at where adaptive learning is working, where it is still limited, and what opportunities may exist in the market.
I also liked that the site included opportunities for participation and reflection throughout. This helped make the OER feel more interactive and gave us space to connect the content to our own educational contexts.
Overall, I thought your OER did a strong job of linking adaptive technology, inclusion, learner support, and market opportunity.