Why IT in education is so important in special school?

http://media.victoriaadvocate.com/img/photos/2012/01/07/kb_vine_school_01xx12_31b_163527.jpg

“Students, teachers, schools and other stakeholders will use IT effectively as a tool for enhancing the effectiveness of learning and teaching, with a view to preparing our students for the information age, turning schools into dynamic and interactive learning institutions, and fostering collaboration among schools, parents and the community.”(EMB, 2004)

In normal setting, IT is used mostly as information retrieval, and then knowledge enquiry communication, and then collaboration, and finally, very little as an analytical personal development tool.

However, the priority in special education may be different. It is because their abilities, but the most important is, when we need to satisfy the student’s special needs; we strongly need help by parents and community.

Nowadays, transdisciplinary (or collaborative) teamwork model is running in special schools. There is not only “Different perspectives lead to better decision-making; no one discipline can provide everything that a child and family needs.”(Kilgo J. L., Aldridge J., Denton B., Vogtel L., Vincent J., Burke C., & Unanue R.)

So, parents should be one of the member when we call meeting about teaching and learning for each of the student. Not only because parents have “best understanding” about the students, but also the primary role of parents is to encourage and support students to plan and achieve their educational goals. Parents also should encourage students to develop independent decision-making and self-advocacy skills.

So, as a communication tools with parents, IT can play the very important role that is everytime, everywhere connect with parents and sharing information.

Another function of IT in special education is as an analytical personal development tool. Not like normal setting, special schools have no test or very few writing assessment. How we assess our students learning progress? Mostly using observation and record whether they can finish their given tasks. So, you can imagine that the information and records just like a hill. To have better analysis the student’s development, IT would give the most help. For example, one of my student need to have toilet training, we would like to record when and how, so database is useful to analysis the progress. In short, Database can individualize the intervention to fulfill different educational needs.

“The majority of teachers expressed confident of basic IT skills, such as word processing, use of spreadsheets, presentation software and Internet usage. But they are least certain about advanced multimedia design and WebPages production.” and “…simply replacing chalk and board by multimedia presentations/animations.” (EMB, 2004). However, in special school, drawing the student’s attention to teaching and learning is the most difficult task. “Multi-media simulation” and “non-error interaction”[4] is powerful teaching and learning elements to students.

Then, I would to specify three topics to illustrate how IT in education fulfills its function by some activities.

In special education, we mostly concern how to satisfy the special educational needs of our students. To specialize and to make the discussion more realistic, I would like to introduce one of my students, KaPo. He is a 17 years old boy with moderate mentally handicap.

KaPo’s case is very typical in my school. Autism is called “Autism spectrum disorder” as its full name. As the name says, Autism has no clearly defined single syndrome (Wing, 1996) and no two children with autism have identical characteristics (Koegel, Koegel, Frea & Smith, 1996; Wong & Westwood, 2002), it covers a wide range of behaviors and abilities, and it is a matter of degree, from mild to severe. However, children with autism typically have difficulties in verbal and non-verbal communication, interactions and leisure or play activities (ASA, 2005). As the above report mentions, KaPo has behavioral and emotional problem, too. He cannot concentrate to do the given tasks. Actually, he also has some stereotyped behavior patterns to bother his learning, for example, hand flapping, clapping and always washing his hand.

Teaching self-management has been effective at improving a variety of behaviors, including appropriate vocational (McNally, Kompik & Sherman, 1984), and even generalization (Koegel, Koegel & Parks, 1996).

The model is called “teach the individual” model, in which the generalization occurs spontaneously in numerous environments and in the absence of a trained interventions provider after the person is taught a skill in a manner. So, self-management is a “pivotal” behavior (Koegel, Schreibman, Good, Cerniglia, Murphy & Koegel, 1989).

Thus, we have using the multi-media program called “FLASH” to design the so-called “social story” and then upload it on the school website. It just like e-book or karaoke that have a story about what he should do. Unlike the social story in paper, it not only has pictures and himself tells story told by teachers, it even has short film that the main character is student himself and the story, too.

For example, we want to reduce KaPo’s unwilling behavior like crying or shout when he wants to express himself unhappy. We first record the willing behavior (e.g. go to toilet to wash his face) by digital camera, and then record his reading by computer, “when KaPo unhappy, KaPo would go to toilet to wash his face.” Then input both into FLASH. When the lesson, teacher would help him to access “e-social story” to modeling and replace his unwilling behavior.

It gives very strong impression and very good to modeling the unwilling behavior. And also it may have a checklist online, when student watch one part of the social story, he should check the box to move to the next part. Teachers is helping him and teach parents to access and to use this tailor-made online software.

“In the present preliminary review, it was found that the problems and issues faced by special schools are very complex and often quite different from the mainstream schools. There are different categories of special schools catering for children with different special education needs. Use of IT in special schools includes the integration of assistive technologies, which often differ greatly across different categories of special schools. Further, the specific educational objectives often differ greatly across different special school categories to take into account the students’ special contexts. It is recommended here that a separate component of the review study be commissioned to address the specific evaluation questions, methodology and instrumentation necessary for conducting a proper review of IT implementation in special schools.”(EMB, 2004)

You can see that, all interventions for different students must be tailor-made. Assistive technologies, for example, most children with moderate mental handicap can’t use keyboard and mouse, touch-screen is needed. However, it is not enough in school, and also at home. All software and programme must be tailor-made by teachers while they can accessible. Time is very important and consumable to satisfy each students special educational needs.

Another problems so-called “Digital Divide”. Many families haven’t computer and of course can’t online at home. Their social status may be low and haven’t enough knowledge to handle their child or teach them by using IT. When the ongoing training is not stable, the effectiveness would down very quickly. For example, to changing KaPo’s unwilling behavior, social story must be told day by day, if the intervention stopped may be in the long holidays, the unwilling behavior will come again.

By the way, Multimedia and interaction elements in IT in education are used to draw the attention of the children and give them the responses directly, and it is very successful. In future, portal computer or PDA can help children with autism to express themselves (using images, sounds, even short film to communicate) and to have better self-management (give them hints or as a reminder).

Reference

1.       Autism Society of America (ASA). http://www.autism-society.org/site/PageServer?pagename=whatisautism.
2.       EMB. (2004). Empowering Learning and Teaching with Information Technology. Hong Kong.
3.       EMB.(2004). Information Technology in Education (ITEd) Evaluation. Summary and Recommendations of the Preliminary Study, pp.201-206. http://www.emb.gov.hk/ited_eval/
4.       Information center on disabilities and gifted education (2005). http://ericec.org/digests/e598.html#top, 10/3/2005
5.       Koegel, R. L., Koegel, L. k. & Parks, D. R. (1996). “Teach the Individual” model of Generalization. In Koegel, R. L. & Koegel L. K. (Eds.) Teaching children with autism: Strategies for initiating positive interactions and improving learning opportunities (pp. 67-77). Baltimore: Brookes.
6.       Koegel, R. L., Schreibman, L., Good, A., Cerniglia, L., Murphy, C. & Koegel, K. L. (1989). How to teach pivotal behaviors to children with autism. Unpublished manuscript, university of California, Santa Barbara.
7.       McNally, R. J., Kompik, J. J. & Sherman, G. (1984). Increasing the productivity of mentally retarded workers through self-management. Analysis and Intervention in Development Disabilities. 4, 129-135.
Westwood, P. (2003), Learning and Learning Difficulties. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong.

[1] ABA stands for Applied Behavior Analysis (Scheuermann & Webber, 2002).
[2] PECS stands for Picture Exchange Communication System
[3] TEACCH stands for Treatment and Education of Autistic and Communication-handicapped Children (Connor, 1999).
[4] Sometimes we give wrong response to students answers, this may border students learning. But computer wouldn’t.