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Amanda Kenuam

Windows 7 Accessibility Features | Special Education - 0 views

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    "special education, SPED, windows 7, Ease of Access Center, Speech Recognition, Magnifier, On Screen Keyboard, Notifications"
Tero Toivanen

An Apple for the Students | By Marcia Kaye | University of Toronto Magazine - 3 views

  • The two-year study, which ended last December, found that within six weeks the devices boosted kids’ attention spans, raised their ability to identify pictured objects by 45 to 60 per cent, and improved communication skills in these mostly nonverbal children by 20 per cent.
  • A surprising bonus: students who had never been sociable were suddenly requesting an iPad to initiate an activity with another student.
  • McEwen suggests that the devices’ appeal may lie in their multisensory nature, with images and sound – and vibration (thanks to the addition of a downloadable app). She adds that the device’s voice app, which is always calm and unemotional, appeals to those who thrive on consistency, including many children with ASD.
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  • One boy in kindergarten who had always ignored green “yes” and red “no” boxes on paper responded instantly to the identical boxes on the screen.
  • The iPad’s larger screen is better suited to children with vision or fine-motor challenges, such as the blind six-year-old in a wheelchair who delights in moving his arm across the tablet to create his own music.
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    Autistic children develop better communications skills when using iPads, researcher finds
J B

Microsoft funds mobile-phone software for autistic children - TechFlash: Seattle's Tech... - 0 views

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    software, available for download under an open-source license, lets kids form visual sentences by touching the phone's screen to select pictures and move them around
Tero Toivanen

Autism Research Blog: Translating Autism: Autism, neurofeedback , and the processing of... - 0 views

  • Children with autism show increased reaction time and unique brain wave patters during tasks that include novel distracters.
  • Children with autism show increased reaction time and unique brain wave patters during tasks that include novel distracters.
  • The participants completed an Odd-Ball task. In this task, the participants are asked to press a key when they see the target letter ( "X" ) on a computer screen. This target letter is presented 25% of the trials. For 50% of the trials a common distracter (the letter "O") is presented instead. For the remaining 25%, a set of novel distracters are presented (different symbols). The researchers recorded the reaction time, accuracy, and brain electrical functioning during the task.
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  • The results showed that participants with autism were slower to press on the key when the target X was presented than typically developing peers. However, the groups did not differ in accuracy of responding.
  • That is, both groups were equally accurate in responding to the X target, but the group with autism showed a slower patter of responses. The group with autism also showed a different pattern of brain activation when confronted with the novel distracters. Their differences were observed in both hemispheres, but were stronger in the right frontal regions. The pattern of responses observed (longer latencies and higher amplitudes) suggest greater effort when processing novel stimuli. This finding is intriguing because the brain response patterns to the other stimuli (target X and the common distracter O) were identical between the groups. These results suggest that the group with autism had difficulty processing and disengaging from novel distracting stimuli.
  • In neurofeedback, the person receives real-time feedback on their brain functioning and is taught how to progressively modify their responses. However, the debate regarding the effectiveness of neurofeedback is ongoing as the research is limited and highly contradictory.
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    Children with autism show increased reaction time and unique brain wave patters during tasks that include novel distracters.
Tero Toivanen

NeuroLogica Blog » Dr. Laureys Admits Facilitated Communication Failure - 1 views

  • This is where the story gets interesting, and where it became an international controversy. Enter Linda Wouters – a speech therapist who uses facilitated communication (FC). She claimed that after months of training she could communicate with Houbens by sensing the subtle movements of his right hand, which he could use to direct her across a computer screen keyboard.
  • FC, unfortunately, is pure pseudoscience. It was introduced in the late 1980s as a wonderful new method for communicating with children with cognitive disorders, on the assumption that they were more verbally than mentally impaired. Many therapists were convinced, and many parents were overjoyed as their previously non-communicative children starting writing poetry expressing their love for their parents. (And there was also a dark side as some children, through FC, started reporting physical and sexual abuse by parents and caretakers.)
  • When people got around to actually testing FC scientifically it turned out, rather unequivocally, that all the communication was being done subconsciously by the facilitator – a phenomenon called the ideomotor effect. They were not just supporting the hand of their client, they were directing it. Well-designed studies showed that the facilitator was always doing all the communication. FC then shrank to a fringe phenomenon – but its adherents would not give up, and FC continues to this day (even sometimes in courtroom testimony), hoodwinking the unawares and having to be debunked all over again and again.
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  • Regarding Rom Houben video showing Wouters performing FC with Houben clearly showed that he could not be doing the communication. In one video Houben was not even looking at the keyboard, and may not have even been awake. But in every video Wouters was moving his hand across the keyboard at unbelievable speeds – not even a neurologically intact person could direct another to keystrokes with such speed an accuracy by just moving one finger.
  • Laureys has now carried out those tests, and his results hold that it wasn’t Houben doing the writing after all. The tests determined that he doesn’t have enough strength and muscle control in his right arm to operate the keyboard. In her effort to help the patient express himself, it would seem that the speech therapist had unwittingly assumed control… In the more recent test, Houben was shown or told a series of 15 objects and words, without a speech therapist being present. Afterward, he was supposed to type the correct word — but he didn’t succeed a single time.
  • It is truly a scandal that FC is still around. Like homeopathy, therapeutic touch, and many similar medical pseudosciences – their persistence is not a failure of science, which has adequately shown them to be nothing but illusions, but rather of collective rationality.
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     It is truly a scandal that FC is still around. Like homeopathy, therapeutic touch, and many similar medical pseudosciences - their persistence is not a failure of science, which has adequately shown them to be nothing but illusions, but rather of collective rationality.
Tero Toivanen

Is Your Child Autistic -- Or Could He Have This Syndrome? - 0 views

  • Children’s Hospital & Research Center Oakland scientist and pediatric emergency medicine physician, Claudia Morris, MD says she has identified a syndrome which combines apraxia (a speech disorder) with symptoms often associated with autism. Many of these symptoms are precisely the ones that are pointed to by those whose children appear to benefit from biomedical treatments -- specifically Gluten and Casein-free diets and vitamin supplements.
  • The data clearly demonstrated a common cluster of allergy, apraxia and malabsorption, along with low muscle tone, poor coordination and sensory integration abnormalities. In addition, Dr. Morris was able to gather laboratory analyses in 26 of the children, which revealed low carnitine levels, abnormal celiac panels, gluten sensitivity, and vitamin D deficiency among others. All children genetically screened carried an HLA gene associated with gluten sensitivity and celiac disease.
  • Most significantly, the data indicate that the neurologic dysfunction represented in the syndrome overlaps the symptoms of vitamin E deficiency. While low vitamin E bioavailability may occur due to a variety of different causes, neurological consequences are similar, regardless of the initiating trigger. The study suggests that vitamin E could be used as a safe nutritional intervention that may benefit some children. Growing evidence support the benefits of omega 3 fatty acid supplementation in a number of neurodevelopmental disorders.
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  • Like all preliminary studies, this one is... preliminary. In other words, it has not been replicated, and the findings may turn out to be misleading.
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    Children's Hospital & Research Center Oakland scientist and pediatric emergency medicine physician, Claudia Morris, MD says she has identified a syndrome which combines apraxia (a speech disorder) with symptoms often associated with autism. Many of these symptoms are precisely the ones that are pointed to by those whose children appear to benefit from biomedical treatments -- specifically Gluten and Casein-free diets and vitamin supplements.
Tero Toivanen

New Study: Autism has Multiple Genetic Roots | Suite101 - 3 views

  • The study’s major finding was that children with ASD have significantly more CNVs affecting their genes than children without ASD. Children with ASD have 20 percent more CNVs in general, and 70 percent more CNVs impacting genes known to be associated with ASD or cognitive problems. Significantly, many of the genes that are affected control important functions such as cell proliferation and cell-to-cell communication.
  • Some of the newly discovered genetic variants are inherited, and are found in parents or siblings of children with them. Others, however, seem to have originated spontaneously in the affected child, and do not appear in other family members.
  • While these findings add significantly to the scientific understanding of the genetic and biological underpinnings of ASD, the immediate usefulness is limited. That’s because there are a very large number of CNVs, and each child shows a different pattern of genetic changes. Each of these changes is rare; no CNV showed up in more than one percent of the children studied.
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  • “This will lead to a paradigm shift in understanding the etiology of autism,” says Stephen Scherer, a senior scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada. “Until now, most scientists thought individuals with autism shared common genes. We now think each person has his own rare variations.”
  • If significant CNVs show up, behavioral treatment can be started early. That has been shown to improve children’s outcomes significantly. “If we provide stimulation early, while the brain is still plastic, we can improve cognitive development, social interaction and communication,” says Geri Dawson, Chief Science Officer of Autism Speaks, the major sponsor of the research project.
  • What this new research suggests is that autism and ASD probably result from the interaction between many different genes and a child’s environment. Rather than search for one single cause and one “magic bullet,” researchers will try to find as many significant genetic variants as possible, link them to the biological functions and pathways they control, and then search for medications that can improve or normalize the functioning of damaged pathways.
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