I support dyslexic adults in various environments. In an age when we should be encouraging our 'Digitally Native' students to communicate effectively eye-to-eye, should I stop my students from texting others while I am teaching them? I used to. Can they really process all of the assistive software instructions, study skills on how to write and remember while texting? I mostly teach one to one and I used to insist they put their phones away as I presumed my dyslexic students cannot multi-task: they cannot process two lots of information while I am teaching them, but I have been proved wrong. It appears that the information I give them is prioritised as equally important to their real world social context. Maybe this is my problem: learning facilitators need to keep abreast of multimodality and in understanding students can process multi-modes of language maybe we can offer them a 3 dimensional way of learning. So, should I wait for my student to finish texting?
