Developing communication skills. To help her overcome her poor communication and social skills and her fear of writing, her teacher introduced her to a desktop publishing package that allowed her to communicate but didn't emphasize writing. As she mastered the program, more and more text elements were introduced and Belinda began to use the text to communicate her ideas and experiences. Equally important, Belinda began to interact with her peers. Anderson suggests that Belinda was successful in using the desktop publishing program because she was actively involved with the software and able to control the equipment.
Information technologies serve to help people communicate with others.
Unfortunately little research has looked at the interactions between groups of students with developmental disabilities. The whole area of Internet access and people with developmental disabilities connecting via networked environments remains to be studied. For example, a project that created school newspapers containing news and information collected by peer reporters from distant classrooms was more effective in motivating students to write than a project that encouraged pairs of students to exchange friendly messages via a computer network. Activities are also more successful when a network coordinator facilitates group planning. In the project where students worked on the school newspaper, the coordinator organized the exchange of student stories and sent out the master pages to the various schools so that a finished version of the paper could be produced.