Speech-recognition software will be available to about 35,000 students in 122 schools in Eastern Ontario this year when the Upper Canada District School Board installs SpeakQ at all of its sites.

SpeakQ – developed at Bloorview Kids Rehab – is designed for students with learning disabilities who struggle to write.

But the principal of special projects for the Upper Canada board believes all students can benefit from it.

“ We’re operating on the premise that adaptive technology is necessary for students with learning disabilities and good for all students,” says Steve McLean. “Good teaching dictates that we hit all of the learning modalities that kids need. Just because a student is doing well or moderately well doesn’t mean that they couldn’t benefit from adaptive technology. There are children other than our kids with learning disabilities who are stronger verbally than they are in a written context.”

With SpeakQ, students speak a word or phrase and see it displayed in a box on their computer screen with four alternate words or phrases that the software predicts. They can click on each word or phrase to hear it spoken before selecting the correct one and inserting it into their document.

Steve says the practice of purchasing adapted technology strictly for students with identified learning problems has been counter-productive.

“What’s generally happened across North America is that those kids have to leave their class and go to a different location to access a program on a single computer. They quickly learn that they don’t want to be identified as different.”

Making the technology uniformly available will remove this stigma and encourage collaboration. “A lot of research tells us that kids learn best from other kids, and this was a problem when Johnny could use the technology but Suzie couldn’t. That kind of sharing couldn’t take place.”