Technology for inclusion

Educational technology has made an effort to assist children and adults with special needs in their endeavour to learn and obtain the skills to lead an independent life as much as possible.

However it would be wrong to assume that only children with mental or physical disabilities need some form of special support in education. We also need to think of children who are healthy and look ‘normal’ but however they have difficulties in their learning experiences. Dyslexia would easily come to mind as an example.

Therefore when we think of Special Education Needs (SEN) we are actually targeting a wide spectrum of persons.

ICT in education, by supporting persons with learning difficulties, and physical or mental disabilities, also promotes inclusion and integration within the community.

The 1994 World Conference on Special Needs Education in Salamanca made an emphasis on inclusion as a mission in the promotion and support of SEN.  Inclusion was defined as being “concerned with the learning, participation, and equal opportunities for all children, youth, and adults with a specific focus on the groups vulnerable to marginalisation and exclusion from society life.”

It could apply, amongst others, to children with special educational needs, including those considered to have emotional, behavioural, sensory, physical, or mental disabilities; gifted and talented pupils who can feel hampered by the relatively slower learning pace of classmates; people who missed the opportunity to study in childhood; children with social difficulties, children from ethnic minorities and/or have problems with the local language; and children with social difficulties.

These groups are usually excluded from mainstream education. Therefore, education for them requires special approaches and techniques.  ICT is one of the tools than are used.

Let’s take a few practical examples.

Children who have difficulties in handwriting can use a keyboard while speech to text software will help those who find it very difficult to write or spell correctly.

Pupils with eyesight difficulties can listen to audio books or have fonts on screens enlarged.  Almost anything on a computer can be made to look bigger and brighter.

There is a huge amount of software, some of it free of charge, in education which can be adapted for the specific needs of children in class. Most of the software includes fun games which help pupils to learn while having fun.

Children who feel threatened by their environment can use online educational resources to study from home or stay away from school for some time and use an e-learning platform and e-mail to communicate.

Children with social skills difficulties can use safe social media to communicate and make new friends while feeling secure and far from any physical challenges.

In special sensory rooms children and adults with special needs can explore and develop their senses and skills.  Computers are use to programme these rooms to provide the right stimulating environment.

There is software to support persons with dyscalculia (doing very bad at maths) and dyslexia (a learning disability that impairs a person's fluency or comprehension accuracy in being able to read).

Hardware and software for mainstream education can also be adapted in certain cases to support learners with some difficulties.

As in any other human endeavour, the problem is not a lack of technology but the lack of acknowledgement that there is a problem and the person in questions needs help. Once this is established, there are standards and procedures on how to support persons with special educational needs through technology.

Quite obviously there needs to be a commitment, both in financial and human resources terms, but the technology is there to help. Let us make it available to all the children to help them improve their life chances.