Genius Hour Project
By: Jasmine R. Norton
Genius Hour Topic
For my topic, I was interested in seeing what technology is available to help students with speech disorders. There are a variety of students that have speech disorders and it gives them a disadvantage in the classroom. This topic is important to K12 education. There are a lot of students who suffer from speech disorders. They are not able to get the specialized education that they need because they can not ask questions as freely as the other students because they are too self-conscious or they physically can not.
Research
I started doing this research by finding pages on twitter to follow that would direct me to websites about speech disorders. Then I communicated with my classmates who had topics similar to mine and we shared information. I also did some of my own extensive research using UGA's library database. So much information was available to me that I had to decide what I wanted to focus on the most for this project.
Twitter has been a helpful resource in helping me find more information about my project. I search “speech disorders” and I am able to see a lot of tweets about this. This is helpful because it directed me to users and websites aboutspeech disorders. Here are a few of the users I follow: @slpllu_ , @SAC_OAC, @lotsofmany, @disabilityscoop. There are quite a few websites that talk about technology that can help students with speech disorders, such as: asha.org, nidcd.nih.gov, nlm.nih.gov and atcoalition.org.
Technology
Reflection
Before, I did this research, I had not idea that there was so many different kinds of technology to help people with speech disabilities. I was pleasantly surprised to see the different devices that could be used to produce speech. I think that it is such a good thing that there are all the options for people. However, I think that more should be done as far as awareness for these devices. Another thing that is an issue is the cost. Most of these devices are pretty expensive. Therefore, only people who can afford these devices will be able to benefit from them. I wish that was not the case. I wish that these devices were more affordable and accessible to everyone who needs them.
Although, I learned so much, there is still a lot to learn. I want to learn more about these devices and I want to see how well they really work. I also want to see the pros and cons of these devices. I also want to learn about the psychological effects that having speech disabilities has on a student. I think it would be interesting to see the way that speech disabilities impacts how students function in classroom settings. This would be a great expansion of this subject and a more in depth way to look at this topic.