THE CLASS BLOG : A NEW OPPORTUNITY FOR CHILDREN WITH LEARNING DISABILITIES
H. Vilas-Boas, A. Ramos
Universidade do Minho (PORTUGAL)
A major challenge of education, in an integration context, is to be able to extend ICT to all students, contributing to their cognitive, social and affective development.
A learning environment that provides important experiences to children implies that the teacher adopts new resources, strategies and methodologies that lead to better daily school practises.
In this context, and as part of the Master in Child Studies – Information and Communication Technologies, we developed a case study to analyse the effects of the ICT use on children with language disabilities (reading and writing) integrated in a class of students of the 2nd and 3rd grade. The investigation took place during the school year 2006/2007 at the school EB1/JI from Paço, Alvelos, Barcelos.
The field study, part of the Class Curricular Project, proposed: a) to stimulate the pleasure of reading and writing, from various strategies and technological resources; b) to encourage the production of different kinds of texts articulated with contents from different curricular areas; c) to promote the online interaction.
We drew up a digital portfolio of the students’ productions in form of a blog available at http://magnificos06.wordpress.com. The blog was created as an integrating element of other digital resources - Word, PowerPoint, e-mail, podcast and educational software – used in school activities in different curricular areas.
The blog allowed students a distance interaction with pairs and other elements from the local education community, national and international; this gave a better insight into the work done, increased the responsibility and the effort to improve students’ productions. The comments and the answer to those comments allowed the development of the critical and reflexive sense and stimulated students to give some responses to many proposed challenges.
In this communication we present: a) the process of blog creation and dynamization, as a curricular integrated resource; b) the articulation strategy of the work of children with learning disabilities with the one of the other children in the class; c) the study results, enforcing the blog’s role in the creation of new learning opportunities for children with learning disabilities.
Keywords: Blog, language learning difficulties; primary school; online interaction.