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Dear Ms. Teacher

Student's letter advocating for updated assisted technology.

Dear Ms. Teacher,

I hope you are having a great day and I hope this is a good time.

I am writing because the equipment to help me with my visual impairment is getting slow and old. I am currently using an iPad Air 2 and a Macbook Air 13” 2015. I would like to request an iPad Pro and an Apple Pencil to replace my current equipment.

The iPad Pro would be helpful to me in school because taking math notes and science notes on my iPad Air 2 so I can enlarge them is kind of challenging. The iPad Pro would help me because it is faster (more on that later) and it has support for Apple Pencil. The Apple Pencil can enable me to take notes for math. This is because in math class my teacher gives us math problems on a worksheet and has us draw charts and models to show how our work is organized. Sometimes we have to color or draw very precise lines for measuring. The Pro can provide a virtual ruler and the pencil won’t pass the ruler when I am drawing a line along it. I cannot use a regular ruler on the screen because i am not able to see the numbers on the ruler if i am measuring something on my eBook. The Apple Pencil is different from a regular pencil because a regular pencil cannot convert my handwriting to digital format. Digital format is important because I can use text to speech to read back what I have written. I need text to speech because of my visual impairment, my eyes tend to get tired very fast. 

Another reason that I need the Pro with Apple Pencil is because in science we have to draw models and tables so when I draw them with my fingers that are gliding along the screen I don’t get a straight line. The Pencil will improve how I draw models and tables because it’s more like drawing a line on a paper and a virtual ruler can appear. Plus, it is scientifically proven that if you write the notes with your hand rather than typing you will remember them better on the occasion that there is a test (5th grade article). 

In ELA & history I usually have to do multitasking on my iPad and with only a nine inch screen that is only about 4 1/2 inches of screen space for apps resulting in me not being able to read them. For this reason, I would like to request the larger 12.9” iPad Pro. Because of the new display, the screen would be brighter. The display will also be able to adapt to the light within the room I am in, and auto adjust so it won’t put stress on my eyes from being too white but the display will still be bright. Automatic color adaptation would be better because of my visual impairment I need color contrast. 

The iPad Pro is also faster than the iPad I have right now. The iPad I have right now lags and the apps often crash a lot. Also with this iPad would it be possible to have a bigger storage capacity? This is because the 16 GB on my Air 2 that I have right now is not enough. The storage is already full and that is why I am stuck using my Mac. The Mac doesn’t work for taking notes because I don’t want to lug around a giant laptop. I want to have something thin and light but still powerful. I don’t trust the iPad to handle my notes anymore because it did fail once before and I still haven’t recovered those notes that were lost. Thank you for considering this request.

By Pasta guy

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