ICT to Support Inclusive Education. Introduction to the Special Thematic Session

This short paper introduces five papers about different ways in which technology can be used to support the education of disabled children and young people. The topics covered include music education (two papers), for children with intellectual impairments in orphanages and autistic learners respectively, science education for hearing impaired students, classroom participation at a distance for autistic students and a recommender app for open learning resources. The approaches used include games, exercises, body motions, animations, a quiz and a robot based system with audio, video and vibro-tactile interfaces. Most of them were successful, but only tested with a small number of children and young people. The presentation of these papers is introduced by a brief discussion of the role of ICT in making education accessible to disabled people. It notes that there has been a tendency to develop learning technologies for specific groups of disabled people rather than for all learners and this is borne out in the papers.