Shine Together
A publication of The Quaker School at Horsham.
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As both the head of a school and the parent of a child with complex challenges, I understand the concerns and struggles that students with learning differences (and their families!) face on a daily basis, both in and outside of the classroom.
That’s why I am so enthralled by the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an assistive technology – one that may soon transform the educational experiences of our children.
Learn about Occupational Therapy, its benefits and the partnership between TQS and Temple University in this month's guest blog.
Recreational therapy (RT), also known as therapeutic recreation, is a treatment service designed to restore, remediate and rehabilitate a person’s level of functioning and independence in life activities, to promote health and wellness as well as reduce or eliminate the activity limitations and restrictions to participation in life situations caused by an illness or disabling condition.
Let me tell you a secret: I didn’t write this blog post. I simply entered the keywords into Rytr, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) writing assistant, and it did the rest.
The result is a high-quality blog post that had all the features of a professionally written piece – without any of the manual effort. It is imperfect yet still pretty darn good considering a computer wrote it.
Can you imagine what this means for students whose disabilities impair their ability to communicate using writing?
When our children are young, we make all of their decisions for them: what they will eat, what they will wear, how they will spend their time. We sign them up for music class or soccer; we balance their plates with fruits and veggies; we pick their playdates and lace their sneakers.
The purpose of all of this control? To ultimately give it away.
Through the internship program at The Quaker School at Horsham, we are able to partner with various colleges in Philadelphia, Montgomery and Bucks counties, and leverage the diverse skills and talents of their students while providing a unique learning experience. One example is the partnership with Temple University.
It can be easy to take literacy for granted in our daily lives. For many, learning the structure of language happens at a young age, and we forget that reading, spelling, and writing are very complex tasks.
For children with complex challenges, however, literacy can be one of the most significant areas of need and support.
When a student struggles with literacy, it impacts all areas of learning. At The Quaker School at Horsham, this is where a specialized method of literacy instruction comes in.
As neurodiverse characters become more prevalent in mainstream media, we must acknowledge and celebrate the uniqueness within that term, and continue to broaden our understanding of “diversity.”
Here at TQS, neurodiversity is one of the many types of diversity embraced by our community. When teaching and interacting with students with complex challenges, we have to acknowledge every day the truth behind those popular autism quotes – each student is an individual, and a diagnosis doesn’t change that.