Looking for ways to support your neurodivergent learners?
In my recent opinion article, Opportunity or Remix, to Larry Ferlazzo’s How To Use AI Tools to Support English-Language Learners, featured in Education Week, I outlined a few use cases of GenAI that can support language learners in impactful ways.
In this post, I’d like to expand on that list of potentially impactful applications by highlighting the potential of GenAI-powered tools to offer more personalised instruction and support for neurodivergent learners.
Teaching neurodivergent learners means tailoring your approach to learners’ needs and giving them extra support to strengthen skills like planning, organization, and time management. This might involve making appropriate adjustments in materials, activities, and assessments to incorporate clearer instructions, provide multimodal input, offer more time, or make tasks more manageable by breaking them into smaller tasks. Often, this means investing extra time to ensure that your materials and activities are meaningful and accessible for these learners.
GenAI can be of much help here.
I’ve recently discovered a fantastic collection of free AI-powered tools called Goblin.tools. These tools can be very helpful if you’re looking to assist neurodivergent learners with tasks they find overwhelming or difficult. The tools are user-friendly and designed to focus on one task at a time.
For instance, the Magic ToDo tool is particularly effective at breaking down tasks in a comprehensive manner.
In addition to manipulating subitems, editing, and breaking them down further, you can also set the necessary ‘level of spiciness’ – how much breaking down you need – and estimate the time needed to complete each subtask.
This tool can be particularly useful when creating assignments for learners. By adjusting the level of spiciness, you can tailor the complexity of the tasks, and estimate the time required for each subtask, allowing learners to better manage their time and workload. This ensures that assignments are appropriately challenging yet manageable for all learners.
The Judge tool may be quite helpful to figure out how one’s text comes across to a neutral party.
The Compiler tool is great when there are a few tasks that need to be juggled at the same time. The Compiler turns ‘braindump’ into actionable items that may be sent to the Magic ToDo tool.
I hope you find these tools useful. Happy exploring!
