Teaching All Students (especially those who physically have trouble writing)

The first day of school this year I had a sad surprise. One of my new students had broken her arm over the summer and was in a cast past her elbow. She was easy going and worked really hard to do the same things as other students, but not everything was possible for her. When it came to writing, she tried really hard to write with her left hand but it was not easy. In order to try to adapt activities to meet her needs, I began perusing app options. Holding a pencil in the non-dominant hand is difficult, but technology makes opposite hand use so much easier. I found an app that would allow me to take a picture of whatever we were working on and allow her to use the touch screen to write with her finger. While it was fun for her to use at first, she eventually stopped using it and instead chose to use a fat pencil in her left hand (easier to hold) and used a clip board to keep her paper still. The app was nothing special and I do not even remember what it was called. 

I remember a past student from another class had had severe medical trauma at a young age that left him with poor fine motor skills. He was unable to use a pencil and instead needed to type everything. I spoke to his teacher and asked what he used to do his work. It turns out that he used an iPad app called Skitch. . 

Skitch is similar to the app that my student had used, however, it was a little bit more user friendly. It had several options for tools including a blurring tool, an emoji tool, stamps for annotating, pens for writing or drawing, a shape drawing tool, arrows for pointing, and text boxes. In addition to the stand alone text boxes, almost every other shape had the option of adding text. For example, if I drew an arrow, I could put a little note with my arrow. 

One benefit of this app, is it was way easier to write bigger blocks of text than the previous app I had tried. This would have made it much easier for my student to write paragraphs when she had a broken arm. Another benefit of this app is that it is not specific to special education. Even if students do not have any kind of disability, they can still use the app. This helps students who need it to feel like everybody else. It can even be fun to use. 


The app has both individual and larger group benefits. If a student is unable to write such as the student with a broken arm and the student with poor fine motor skills, this is a great way to meet their needs without drawing attention to their trouble. On a larger scale, I can see this app having other class benefits. If the class is working on close reading, they can take a picture of what they are reading to annotate a book that they are unable to write in. 

The only problems I had when I was playing around with Skitch were that I had a hard time filling in multiple choice bubbles and I couldn't figure out how to save work as a photo from the app. When it comes to filling in bubbles, I think it will be much easier on an iPad than it was on my phone but it may just take practice and patience. If neither of those help, the student can put a stamp on the bubble instead. I'm sure that would be super engaging for them. I can just imagine seeing smiley face emojis on all of the answers! My other issue wasn't a huge problem either but I personally prefer saving things as photos and the app made it tricky to be able to do that. They did provide other great options for exporting the final project that I thought might be fun to explore. For example, the work can be imported into Explain Everything which may be super helpful because allowing a student to verbally explain their work could solve some of the issues that may arise from having a difficult time visually representing their thoughts. I got around my issue by simply taking a screen shot of my work. I ended up exporting my work into Notes as well. That was cool because I could type more that wasn't on my original document. Having my work in notes also allows me to be able to send it via email which hadn't been an option before. 

Honestly, I wish I found this app sooner. I have some students whose hand writing is so bad that I need them to read their answers to me. Some are just having a hard time feeling motivated to work. For example, the student work that I added to was completed by one of my most knowledgeable and well read students but he HATES to take the time to write things down. He may have been far more motivated if he were able to write or type on the iPad. 

While this school year is close to an end, it is going to be even more of a struggle to maintain motivation for students to work so this app could be incorporated into the classroom this year. I would introduce it during reading groups and allow students to answer questions or do reading responses using Skitch within small groups. As more kids understand how to use the features and tools, it will be easier to use with the whole class in other areas (such as math or writing).