Assistive Tech That Can Benefit All: Priority Matrix

Introduction to Tech for Students with Disabilities

Tech for students with disabilities is an important situation for all teachers as all teachers will have students with disabilities that they will need to accommodate at some point in their careers. For example, this past year our school had a new student entering grade six who required the use of a wheel chair. However, what many of the teachers did not take into account was "how are we going to seat the student?" Yes, something as simple as finding ways to seat the student became an issue that took about two weeks to handle. Some classes had tables that his wheel chair would not fit under, other classes used individual desks which the student could not sit in and be safe.

Now, not all teachers will have a student with a wheel chair enter their class, nor are the guaranteed to have students with other disabilities that require major technology in order to participate fully in the classroom. And even if they do, some school systems will have a person/department in charge of being up to date on all the new technology to help students succeed. Our school has an "Assistive Technology" person in charge of finding tech for students and writing up proposals in order to get approval for students to obtain special technology for their education.

Today I want to talk about assistive technology that can be specifically geared toward students with low executive functioning skills which are often one of the symptoms of students with ADHD and ASD. What is great about finding tech that can help these students is that these technologies can actually benefit ALL students! So while I was specifically looking for tech for helping ADHD students, I ran into Priority Matrix, which is an organizational app that uses the four quadrant model to help students prioritize their tasks.

The App: Priority Matrix

The first thing I looked at was to see if this app was free and could be used on iOS, android, and PC. The answers were yes and yes. This is a free app that is available on all platforms. One has to create an account with an email address, but they can access it quickly by using a Microsoft, google, or apple ID. What then happened was a matrix popped up that already had tasks in it. The tasks were actually a quick tutorial on how to use the features of the app. 

Once you complete a task, you can drag it to the bottom of the page and it shows that you can remove it by either throwing it in the trash or putting it on the checkmark to show completion. 

What is cool about putting completed tasks on the checkmark is that there is a page that shows all of the work a student has completed. This will allow them to feel a sense of accomplishment as they succeed at completing tasks. 

Students can also move tasks as they switch categories. This picture below has the categories of: Do Now, Do Later, Delegate, and Postpone. I would make a quadrant that had Urgent/Important, Not Urgent/Important, Urgent/Not Important, and Not Urget/Not Important.

One of the really cool things about this app is that it allows you to share it with others (like a google doc) so that multiple students can work on the project together. Also, this allows the teacher to create and share a matrix with students who need help organizing and prioritizing their assignments.

Another feature that could be beneficial to the students is that it allows someone to type in notes (which could be instructions for the tasks) and also include files which might be necessary for the task to be completed. 

Classroom Application

The way I would use this tech is to make it available to all students to use it however they see fit. However, what I would do for my students who needed help with executive functioning skills, I would set up and create the tasks for them, then I would share it with them. I would also get with other teachers so that they could also include their assignments on the quadrant as well. This would allow the student to see what tasks were most important to get done and which could wait. Also, if there were a large project do, this app could help these students break the project up into parts which will allow them a better chance at success.

Possible Issues

The cons of this app are that first it is a bit tricky to do some of the tasks. As a result, I do not think this is an app that students could use without some training from the teacher. Therefore, expect to take some training time out of the class to teach how to use the app. Second, this app was designed as a business app. The result is that the default quadrant is not set up for students, most classes do not let students delegate assignment, nor do they allow students to postpone their assignments. So, each time a new task list is opened up, they will have to rename all the quadrants.