Assistive Technology Again and Again

I've talked some about technology to assist individuals with disabilities and limitations from a strictly technological perspective, but through some of my site jumping I found some fun stuff. One of the sites that I ran into, then re-ran into, because at first I was like, "not going to work", but then my little light bulb flickered on. I went around in all of my classes a few days ago asking people about what they thought about a dog being a form of technology, most told me that I was an idiot. When people think of the word technology, they assume electronic. Through my research I've discovered that the word is not limited its electronic counterpart. I looked at it from a different perspective entirely. Take an example from my last post: the screen-reading program, perfect because the assistive portion of this technology isn't the program itself, it's the (product) voice that reads the screen and allows for someone with a visual impairment to "see" what is on the screen. What if one looks at a dog with a special holster. Is it a dog, or is the product of a specialized program that trains the animal to act as the eyes of someone who cannot see. Assistive Technology is an ever-evolving aspect of technology, and especially one that I feel educators must understand, if not master, and I hope that some of the information and insight that I found and provided can help open the eyes of some of the future and present educators that find themselves unable to "see" the big picture and "visualize" where technology is taking our classrooms.