EHS Student to Receive Award from Kansas Education Commissioner
By The Emporia Gazette (Contact)
Friday, September 28, 2007
Assistive technology has made a big difference in what Samantha Bauman has accomplished during her school career. The Emporia High School senior is an A student with dreams of being an educator, perhaps in other countries.
Samantha and her mother, Linda Bauman, believe her success would not have been possible without the tools technology has provided. Samantha has a reading and spelling disability and reading and writing even short amounts of text can take a long time. When she is ready to move on to a new paragraph, she already has forgotten what she just read.
Six years ago, when Samantha was in seventh grade, she got a computer with software that reads text back to her and predicts words for her as she writes. The software is Co:Writer and Write Out Loud. Co:Writer is a writing assistant with intelligent word prediction that helps students build and write complete and correct sentences. Write OutLoud is a talking word processor. Together, the tools allow her to hear, see and write her assignments.
Because of Samantha’s academic success, she will receive one of nine Outstanding Student Technology Awards next Friday at the Kansas Assistive Technology Conference in Emporia . The conference is sponsored by the Kansas Infinitec Coalition in partnership with the Flint Hills Special Education Cooperative. Kansas Commissioner of Education Alexa Posny will present the awards with Paul Dulle, Infinitec president.
Assistive technology is any device or material a student must have to access the regular curriculum. Items can range from low-tech materials such as anti-skid surfaces to high-tech word to nine students for their successful use of assistive technology.
Samantha said she also takes advantage of other technology to improve her ability to read and comprehend in all her classes. All of her textbooks on are CDs so she can hear them read aloud. She also uses a digital recorder to record classroom lectures and discussions. This allows her to download the text of those lectures onto her computer screen and use the Write OutLoud software to study. Technology also has opened up the world of internet research materials to her. She said she can copy internet research into the word processor and have it read back to her.
Many teachers are familiar with Samantha’s success with assistive technology because she has helped train teachers on its use. Marla Darby, the Instructional Media Center coordinator for the Flint Hills Special Education Cooperative and ESU, invites Samantha to help her with training so teachers can see exactly how the tools are used by students.
Samantha and her family will be guests of honor at the Infinitec Awards Luncheon next Friday. She also has invited her “extended family” — all of the teachers who have helped her along the way. Two of those teachers, Sharol Cutrell and Tammi Wirsig, nominated Samantha for the award.
Linda Bauman is proud of her daughter’s accomplishments. “The technology gives her a more equal chance to compete with her peers. I am very proud of her.”
Samantha loves to travel and has spent the past two summers in Japan and Germany . She hopes to be a teacher, perhaps in another country. During her senior year, she also is a student at Flint Hills Technical College , enrolled in the Health Occupations Technology program.