7B Tim Calhoun Response to John Chandler

John,
I really enjoyed reading your paper and power point.  I chose your research to see what you found on assisitve technology, due to the fact that I to researched this topic as well.  Through my research I found a lot of similarities in the use and practice of AT devices.  Your paper pointed out ample amounts of uses and examples of AT.  Assistive technology has a wide range of "technology", from something as simple as glasses, to a high tech voice to text machine or application.  I learned a lot more about AT from your paper, as to how individuals and schools obtain AT specifically.  Your research showed how private and public sectors provide funding for AT, as well as state and federal government.  AT also requires significant planning to be implemented into an individuals life.  Through my research and reading yours, AT takes a lot of time to implement because along with technology requires a lot of training.  training can include teachers, aids, and parents alike, which takes time.  As I found to, time often times equals money, so with teachers having to be trained in how to use technology it causes more expenses for school districts.
Along with the failures of AT that you found, such as mechanical issues, and technology not fitting the specific students needs, I to found that one major failure of AT is from the side of training.  Like you pointed out if the student does not see benefits coming from the technology its often times abandon.  However, I feel that a lot of times this can come from teachers not being trained on how to work some devices.  Like I mentioned before training is often times expensive, and school districts do not want to pay for their teachers to go to training.  Therefore it is left up to the teachers to teach thimbles on how to implement and use the AT.  This causes problems because teachers don't often time have the time to train on one specific form of AT and this could leave a promising effective piece of technology out of the classroom because teachers don't know how to use it.\
I enjoyed reading through your research very much, it gave me even more information on assistive technology than what I got through my research. Great job!