Giving Compass' Take:

• Technology for blind and visually impaired students is now available and already making a difference for high schoolers. Ann Wai-Yee Kwong shares her story of how digital braille readers, 3-D printers, and audio textbooks helped her experience science class like never before. 

• The article makes a point that technology would not be effective without inspiring teachers to help empower students to use it. While technological innovation in education is helpful, do we need to make sure that teachers are accustomed to these changes, and can still run the classroom in tandem with these new tools?

• EdSurge's piece expands on the dichotomy of teachers and technology in the classroom. 

As high school student in Los Angeles, Ann Wai-Yee Kwong, who is visually impaired, remembers what it was like when her classmates did a science project. Kwong couldn’t do much besides sit quietly and “robotically copy data from my non-disabled peers. … I definitely did not feel included. I felt like a second-class citizen.”

But in her senior year at Valley Academy of Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles Unified, an explosion of new technology made it much easier for blind students to study science the way some educators say it’s best learned: by doing hands-on projects, not listening to someone else talk about it.

Using digital Braille readers, “smart” pens affixed with thermometers, 3-D printers, audio textbooks and other innovations, Kwong, and other blind and visually impaired students can now conduct their own science experiments and even pursue scientific careers that might have been exceedingly difficult before.

One of the most important inventions has been the digital Braille reader, a laptop with voice software and a plastic Braille keyboard in which small round pegs raise and lower to form Braille letters, enabling a blind person to read and create text.

“It always felt like blind people couldn’t do anything as visual as science. Chemistry, especially,” Kwong said. “But now we have an equalizing of the playing field. I feel like I’m finally empowered to be part of my own education.”

Read the full article about tech helping blind people by Carolyn Jones at EdSource.