The effects of one-to-one computing for students with disabilities in an inclusive language arts class

Technology has become increasingly prominent in schools. The purpose of this study was to examine the integration of technology with students with disabilities, particularly the use of one-to-one computing when used in inclusive classrooms. This study took a qualitative approach exploring how one teacher integrated one-to-one computing into her curriculum and how students with disabilities perceived that integration. The nine week study took place in a rural, Midwest, eighth grade inclusive language arts classroom. The general education language arts teacher and two students who received special education services were participants in the study. Data were collected from teacher interviews, student interviews, transcripts of classroom activities, observational field notes, and document analysis. The data analysis resulted in 11 themes in response to the three research questions. The results suggested that this teacher used a variety of resources while integrating one-to-one laptops to engage her students. The students specifically described the teacher as a role model on how to use new technological applications for academic purposes such as completing and submitting assignments electronically. The findings from teacher and student data revealed perceived learning benefits and barriers of using one-to-one computing. One significant benefit of one-to-one computing was how it assisted the teacher\u27s integration of 21st century skills in the curriculum. This integration of one-to-one laptops leveled the playing field for students with disabilities by increasing access, promoting social benefits, and practicing the content at their level. Students in this study experienced learning benefits as their student responsibilities changed. Despite some barriers to one-to-one implementation, students\u27 preference would be to continue to learn with one-to-one laptops rather than going back to traditional methods of receiving instruction. Several recommendations to increase the integration of technology were suggested. Recommendations included structured professional development such as technology training, differentiated instruction, and constructivist teaching, additional time for peer collaboration, becoming familiar with students\u27 IEPs, and sharing district goals for one-to-one computing. Suggestions for future research consisted of comparing first to third year one-to-one implementation for students with disabilities, differences in technology integration between novice and experienced teachers, and the effects of gaming for students with disabilities

Web Educational Services for All: The APEINTA Project

Proceedings of: 8th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A'11), Hyderabad, India, March 28-29, 2011This paper presents the web-based educational services included in the APEINTA project. The main aim of APEINTA is to avoid barriers among the students and the education. Taking into account the advantage of cloud computing paradigm, the next web-based services are proposed: First, a captioning service, so students with hearing disabilities, for instance, could access to the verbatim speech of the teachers, even in a remote location; Second, a text-to-speech service, so students with speaking problems could participate in the class or in oral discussions or meetings, for instance, just writing in their personal devices; Third, a web-based educational system, so every student can access the pedagogical resources with time and location independenc

Computing Technologies: A Cornerstone for Educational and Employment Equity

The rate of employment for people with disabilities is very low relative to employment levels of non-disabled people. One factor that appears to contribute to greater employment is the level of education achieved by the individual. The impact of higher levels of education on employment is reflected in the general population, but is particularly apparent in the statistics of people with disabilities. Unfortunately, disproportionately few people with disabilities take advantage of postsecondary education. Technology is important for people with disabilities as a vehicle to education and eventually to employment. Computing technologies have been demonstrated as a powerful assistive tool to aid people with disabilities in an academic environment, especially as we are rapidly moving into the information age. These factors lead to the recommendation that we need to (a) provide "equity tools" for disabled students in postsecondary settings to enable access to computing technologies, (b) provide accompanying instruction and academic support, (c) educate students in the human services fields in the roles and processes of computing technologies, and (d) research and disseminate information on the equity tools and applications of these tools.Le taux d'emploi des personnes handicapées est très bas relativement au taux d'emploi des personnes non-handicapées. Un facteur qui semble contribuer au niveau d'emploi est l'éducation acquise par l'individu. L'impact de l'éducation sur l'emploi se reflète dans la population générale, mais se voit particulièrement dans les statistiques concernant les handicapées. Malheureusement, proportionnellement peu de personnes handicapées profitent de l'éducation postsecondaire. La technologie est importante pour les personnes handicapées comme véhicule à l'éducation et éventuellement à l'emploi. Les technologies d'informatique ont été démontrées comme outils d'aide puissants aux gens défavorisés dans un milieu académique. Il est aussi reconnu que nous passons rapidement dans l'ère de l'information. Ces facteurs nous mènent à la recommandation qu'il faut (a) fournir des «outils d'équité» pour les élèves handicapés dans le milieu postsecondaire pour donner accès aux technologies d'informatique, (b) fournir ensemble instruction et support académique, (c) éduquer les élèves dans les domaines des services sociaux à propos des rôles et les procédures des technologies d'informatique, et (d) faire une recherche et une dissémination de l'information à propos de ces outils d'équité et de leurs applications

The Evolution of E-Inclusion: Technology in Education for the Vision-Impaired

The 1970s and 1980s saw a rapid take-up in the use of personal computers. During the same time period, society began to move towards providing equity for people with disabilities. As legislators around the world created new disability and Information Technology policies, more people with disabilities were given access to education and the evolving computing tools provided unprecedented educational opportunities. These opportunities were due to the use of new technologies such as outputting of electronic text to voice synthesizers. The provision of assistive technology was not only helpful; it also provided education through a medium that was previously unavailable, particular to the blind and vision impaired. For much of the 1980s the development of text-processing sensory technologies, connected to personal computers, led to a closer equality between the educational services of the able-bodied and people with disabilities. Unfortunately this evolution as not without notable difficulties: issues surrounding the cost of products, the lack of support from large corporations and choice of platform resulted in substantial difficulties for educators in the assessment of appropriate technology. In addition, many of these products became largely redundant in the late-1980s as corporations began to place more emphasis on the Graphical User Interface (GUI). Although the GUI was remarkably successful in allowing the general public to gain better access to personal computing, it’s non-text nature once again caused a digital divide for people with disabilities. Although it is clear that the evolution of the personal computer has had a significant impact on the provision of education for people with disabilities, this paper highlights the historical repetition where innovation is prioritized above e-inclusion

The development of accessibility indicators for distance learning programs

A study was undertaken to explore program policies and practices related to the accessibility of American distance learning courses to qualified students with disabilities. A literature review was conducted, a draft list of accessibility indicators was created, examples of applications of the indicators in existing distance learning programs were collected, the indicators were systematically applied to one distance learning program, input from a variety of distance learning programs was used to further refine the indicators, and these programs were encouraged to adopt the indicators and make use of resources provided by the project. Results of this exploratory work suggest that incorporating accessibility considerations into policies, procedures and communications of a program requires consideration of the unique needs of students, course designers, instructors and evaluators; involves approval and implementation at a variety of administrative levels; and is an ongoing process that may be implemented in incremental steps

Reinspection of curriculum areas 1996-97: report from the Inspectorate

FEFC INSPECTION REPORT 109/97 REINSPECTION OF CURRICULUM AREAS, OCTOBER 1996 TO MAY 1997 The Council has agreed that colleges with curriculum areas judged by the inspectorate to have more weaknesses than strengths (grades 4 or 5) may have their funding agreement with the Council qualified to prevent them increasing the number of new students enrolled in those areas until the Council is satisfied that the weaknesses have been addressed satisfactorily. The Council requires that colleges are given the opportunity to have curriculum areas graded 4 or 5 reinspected within a year of their original reinspection. Colleges may request the Council to defer reinspection if they do not believe that sufficient improvements in provision have been achieved. This is a report on those curriculum areas, reinspected between October 1996 and May 1997. Inspectors visited 18 colleges to reinspect 19 curriculum areas which had been judged by the inspectorate to have more weaknesses than strengths. Significant improvements were found in all but one of the curriculum areas. The reinspection grades are shown in the table below. The table also indicates those colleges with curriculum areas graded 4 or 5 which will be included in a future reinspection report

Reinspection of curriculum areas 1995-96 : report from the Inspectorate

REINSPECTION OF CURRICULUM AREAS, FEBRUARY 1995 TO MAY 1996 The Council has agreed that colleges with curriculum areas judged by the inspectorate to have more weaknesses than strengths (grade 4 or 5) may have their funding agreement with the Council qualified to prevent them increasing the number of new students enrolled in those areas until the Council is satisfied that the weaknesses have been addressed satisfactorily. The Council requires that colleges are given the opportunity to have curriculum areas graded 4 or 5 reinspected within a year of their original reinspection. Colleges may request the Council to defer reinspection if they do not believe that sufficient improvements in provision have been achieved. This is a report on those curriculum areas, reinspected between February 1995 and May 1996. Inspectors visited 22 colleges to reinspect 28 curriculum areas which had been judged by the inspectorate to have more weaknesses than strengths. Significant improvements were found in all areas. The reinspection grades are shown in the table below, with information about those colleges with curriculum areas graded 4 or 5 which will be included in a future reinspection report

Accommodating disability in higher education: a closer look at the evidence for a mainstream framework of learning support

In a recently published research article in this journal, Avramidis & Skidmore (2004) argued that it is time we placed issues of disability provision more in the context of provision for the generic student. They presented a study based on the Learning for All Questionnaire (LfAQ), which investigated certain implied issues. Findings indicated a need for improved educational provision for all students. No differences were found between disabled and non-disabled students in perceived level of needs or support for university, tutoring and lecturing systems. This null finding was the same for the learning support needs of disabled versus non-disabled students, with both groups wanting identical changes to the way the university's central learning support service responds to learning needs. These findings were taken as calling for a move away from a ‘specialist’ framework of disability provision and towards a ‘mainstream’ framework instead, in which the needs of disabled students are accommodated within improvements made in learning for all. Further, the Disabled Students' Allowance should be given over to departments in order to help fund this change in ‘institutional habitus’. In this article, four serious failings of the study and analyses are outlined. When these are addressed in a disability-theoretic reanalysis of the LfAQ data, every main finding is reversed. It is concluded that educational provisions are generally adequate. Students would welcome changes but these are more to do with increasing levels of convenience rather than learning support issues. Furthermore, the LfAQ data actually refute rather than support a mainstream framework of disability provision

Development of Telephone-based e-Learning Portal

The proliferation of mobile phones in Nigeria, particularly among the student community, has continued to inspire the development and delivery of e-Learning applications. Most of the existing web-based e-Learning applications do not support nomadic voice-based learning (i.e. learning on the move through voice), and consequently do not provide a speedy access to information or enquiries on demand. Internet access is required to get every bit of information from most school portal system, which is not directly available to everyone. Lack of provision for voice in the existing web applications excludes support for people with limited capabilities such as the visually impaired and physical disabilities. In this paper, we present a design and development of a prototype telephone-based e-Learning portal that will be used for course registration and examination. This study is part of an ongoing e-Learning project involving the following modules: enrollment, course registration and examination, enquiries/information, messaging/collaboration, e-Learning and library. The prototype application was developed using VoiceXML for the voice user interface(VUI), PHP for database queries, Apache as the middle-ware and MySQL database as back-end. A unified modelling language (UML) was used to model and design the application. The proposed e-Learning system will compliment the web-based system in other to meet the needs of students with a range of disabilities such as visual impairment, repetitive strain injury, etc, that make reading and writing difficult. It also makes multiple platforms available to all users as well as boosting access to education for the physically challenged, particularly the sight impaired in the developing countries of the world. In institutions where students are not allowed to use mobile phones or where cost is an issue, then the alternative is the use of PC-phone

Reinspection of curriculum areas, 1997–1998: report from the Inspectorate

FEFC INSPECTION REPORT 109/98 Reinspection of Curriculum Areas, 1997–1998 The Council has agreed that colleges with curriculum areas judged by the inspectorate to have more weaknesses than strengths (grade 4 or 5) may have their funding agreement with the Council qualified to prevent them increasing the number of new students enrolled in those areas until the Council is satisfied that the weaknesses have been addressed satisfactorily. The Council requires that colleges are given the opportunity to have curriculum areas graded 4 or 5 reinspected within a year of their original inspection. Colleges may request the Council to defer reinspection if they do not believe that sufficient improvements in provision have been achieved