Lighting the Flame of Learning for Students with Disabilities
Through the Use of Interactive Whiteboard Technology
White Paper
Su-2006-02
Prepared by:
The Corporation for Public School Education K16
16
cpse K
www.cpse-k16.com
Dr. Omar Lopez
Summer 2006
Lighting the Flame of Learning
for Students with Disabilities
Introduction
For many years, educators have come to recognize the potential role that technology
can play in helping all students—particularly those with disabilities—master standardsbased curriculum. Only a few years ago, most students with disabilities were engaged in
computer-based "drill and kill" activities while their non-disabled classmates were
engaged in assignments based on increasingly higher state standards. However, recent
developments in assistive technology combined with advances in personal computers
have created an equitable learning environment for students with a variety of
disabilities. Digital information can now be accessed and used in different modes to
meet disabled students’ diverse learning needs.
The result is that today's technology-based instruction promotes an emphasis on
students constructing meaning based on a high degree of interactivity among students,
between students and curriculum, and between students and teacher. An emerging class
of technology that offers enormous potential in generating these interactions is
interactive whiteboards or active classrooms. The purpose of this paper is to examine
the potential of active classroom technology in lighting the flame of learning for students
with disabilities.
Background
The promise of a free, quality education to children with disabilities became available with
the passage of landmark federal legislation in 1975 now known as the Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Before this law, students with disabilities were
segregated and given different types of instruction because educators thought such
students could not participate in a regular classroom. The law has been revised many
times over the years. The most recent amendments were passed by Congress in
December 2004 and the updated mandate now furthers many of the provisions of the
No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, such as increasing accountability for students with
disabilities, ensuring highly qualified teachers in the classrooms, expanding the types of
methods used to identify students with learning disabilities, and reducing litigation.
The updated IDEA provides guidance on how states and school districts provide special
education and related services to students with disabilities. The education act also
makes provisions for financial assistance to states in their efforts to ensure a free
appropriate public education for children with disabilities. However, two civil rights laws
also serve students with disabilities: Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and
the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990. While the IDEA defined the rights of
children with disabilities to attend public schools, Section 504 and the ADA provide
broader protection to children with disabilities, including requiring new schools to be
architecturally accessible. Section 504 and the ADA also require that students with
disabilities have access to the same academic services, programs, and activities as
their non-disabled classmates, which includes access to their schools' technological
infrastructures.
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Lighting the Flame of Learning
for Students with Disabilities
The Challenge to Educating Students with Disabilities
The National Center for Educational Statistics reports that of the 48,710,000 estimated
public school students in school year 2004-05 (2006a), about 6,727,000 or 13.8% were
students with disabilities (2006b). About 96 percent of these students with disabilities
attended regular schools and three-quarters were being educated in regular education
classrooms with non-disabled children for 40% or more of the school day (NCES, 2005).
However, students with disabilities are not alike.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education
Act (IDEA) identifies 13 qualifying
conditions that define a student with a
disability or disabilities, as shown in the
box to the right (NCES, 2006c).
In spite of a disability, students with such
conditions often bring tremendous assets
to the classroom. For example, students
with disabilities may be able to engage in
creative problem solving, understand
multiple perspectives, and recognize the
value of collaboration and persistence at
an early age—critical skills that all
students can use.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
Autism
Deafness
Deaf-Blindness,
Hearing Impairment
Mental Retardation
Multiple Disabilities
Orthopedic Impairment
Other Health Impairment (e.g., AIDS)
Emotional Disturbance
Specific Learning Disability
Speech or Language Impairment
Traumatic Brain Injury
13. Visual Impairment
Of the 13 conditions listed above, the one with the most students identified is number
10, Specific Learning Disabilities, and is defined as follows:
A disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in
understanding or in using language, spoken or written, that may manifest
itself in an imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or to
do mathematical calculations, including conditions such as perceptual
disabilities, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, and
developmental aphasia. The term does not include learning problems that
are primarily the result of visual, hearing, or motor disabilities, of mental
retardation, of emotional disturbance, or of environmental, cultural, or
economic disadvantage (NCES, 2006c).
In school year 2003-04, of the total 6,118,437 students with disabilities, about 46.4% or
2,839,694 were identified with a Specific Learning Disability condition (IDEAData, 2004).
The implication is that the teacher’s challenge to educating students with disabilities is one
primarily based on choosing effective instructional practices appropriate for all students—
including students with specific learning disabilities. The teachers’ working knowledge of
physical and curricular adaptations in the classroom and test accommodations is also
essential to lower learning barriers for students that have one or more of the disability
conditions.
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Lighting the Flame of Learning
for Students with Disabilities
Strategies for Educating Students with Disabilities
Students with special needs are more likely to experience school success if educators use
long-term consistent strategies across all classrooms, along with efforts to involve parents
and the community. Strategies most effective are those that integrate the fundamentals
of high-quality instructional practices.
What are high-quality instructional practices?
Catherine Cobb-Morocco (2001) proposes four research-based principles of teaching
students with disabilities:
1. Instruction designed around authentic tasks.
2. Opportunities to build cognitive strategies.
3. Learning that is socially mediated.
4. Engagement in constructive conversations.
She proposes that as special needs students engage in instruction based on these
principles, their additional learning needs will become visible and teachers can respond
through more domain-specific instructional support practices. The implication is that
teachers need to have working knowledge of a variety of effective instructional
strategies to flexibly support student achievement of students with disabilities. Such
strategies should include the construction of meaning from different perspectives, the
use of relevant materials, and a focus on higher-order thinking and problem solving
(NCREL, 2003).
Interactive Whiteboard Technology:
Lighting the Flame of Learning for Students with Disabilities
For many years, educators have come to recognize the potential role that technology
can play in helping all students—particularly those with disabilities—master standardbased curriculum. Only a few years ago, most students with special needs were
engaged in computer-based "drill and kill" activities while their non-disable classmates
were engaged in rigorous assignments based on increasingly higher state standards.
However, recent developments in assistive technology combined with advances in
personal computers have created an equitable learning environment for students with a
variety of disabilities. Digital information can now be accessed and used in different
modes to meet disabled students’ diverse learning needs.
3
Lighting the Flame of Learning
for Students with Disabilities
The result is that today's technology-based instruction promotes an emphasis on
students constructing meaning based on a high degree of interactivity among students,
between students and curriculum, and between students and teacher. An emerging class
of technology that offers enormous potential in generating these interactions is
interactive whiteboards or IWBs. An IWB is a large, interactive whiteboard that is
connected to a digital projector and a computer. The projector displays the image from
the computer screen on the board. The computer can then be controlled by touching the
board with a special pen or a special wand that can be used with a slate by students
that are physically disabled. The wand and slate controls the interactive whiteboard thus
allowing the student to participate in the classroom. These active classrooms can
address the four instructional principles outlined earlier in a variety of ways.
Instruction designed around authentic tasks.
Authentic tasks have three characteristics that support content understanding. The first
characteristic of authentic tasks is learning experiences that integrate students’ prior
knowledge with new information through intellectual activities such as questioning,
information gathering, organizing, interpreting, and synthesis of that information (CobbMorocco, 2001). Active classrooms can support all of these effective instructional
strategies for disabled students. Through active classroom technology, teachers can link
disabled students prior experience with new learning by bringing students’ interests and
experiences into the classroom through digital images, music, and other media. The result
is that teachers in Active classrooms can create learning environments where disabled
students construct their own personal knowledge as teachers scaffold students’ learning
with new content knowledge.
The second characteristic of authentic tasks is activities that help students explore ideas
and ways of knowing identified as important in a content area (Cobb-Morocco, 2001).
Active classrooms bring many sources of multisensory learning such as visual,
kinesthetic, and auditory information into the classroom—maps, charts, graphs,
timelines, films, photographs, interviews, oral histories—that create alternative learning
pathways for students with learning disabilities.
Because students with learning disabilities have usually experienced debilitating failure
in school, the third authentic task characteristic is learning experiences that are
meaningful to their lives beyond school (Cobb-Morocco, 2001). Through the IWB,
students can access the Internet, making connections to real life and current issues and
engage in multimedia projects. To help students become more actively engaged in the
process, the teacher can organize the students into smaller groups by talent, expertise,
topic interest or student choice or grouped heterogeneously to maximize learning from
each other. Thus, the teacher can use the active classroom to teach individuals or the
whole class. The teacher becomes a facilitator of learning when multimedia projects
are incorporated into the curriculum. Thus, the teacher in an Active classroom becomes a
project manager that supports student ownership of the learning process (Simkins and
Cole, 2002).
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Lighting the Flame of Learning
for Students with Disabilities
Opportunities to build cognitive strategies.
Cognitive strategies are domain-specific learning strategies that provide students with
tools for building an understanding of important ideas and ways of knowing in that
content area (Palincsar & Collins, 2000). Such strategies help disabled students with
lower-ordered tasks like correcting spelling and punctuation, but also with higherordered tasks like rereading science reports to check for specificity and coherence,
developing a historical timeline, organizing a persuasive essay, or identifying the
elements of a word problem (Cobb-Morocco, 2001).
Active classroom technology-features can compensate for many differences in
background that disabled students bring to the classroom and can help them develop
cognitive strategies that encourage students to learn. Many teachers that use IWBs in
their classroom claim that such technology promotes student learning because of its
multimedia and multi-sensory capacity. For example, teachers have reported that an
IWB’s capacity to present stimulating visual images enhances students’ recall of
information from being able to still “see” the images in their mind even after completing
the lesson (Burden, 2002).
Project-based learning, thematic instruction, and cooperative grouping are strategies
that teacher can use to engage special needs students. Such strategies give students
opportunities to talk about shared learning experiences and to engage in hands-on,
experiential learning experiences that promote learning of new material relevant to their
lives beyond the classroom. Active classrooms can help learning disabled students in
this latter process by making available multimedia, simulations, and modeling (Brown,
Miller, & Robinson, 2002).
The active classroom’s capacity to present a range of multimedia resources efficiently is
also argued to help students learn. This is not only because there is more information
available, there is also a wider variety of information so that ideas and concepts become
more tangible and students find the concepts easier to assimilate (Levy, 2002).
Moreover, teachers report that they can more easily accommodate a wider range of
student learning styles using IWBs, when needed for particular students’ needs (Bell,
2002; Billard, 2002).
Learning that is socially mediated.
Social interaction plays an essential role in construction and invention of students’
knowledge. In social mediated interaction, the teacher’s goal is to identify and/or
structure ways in which students—disabled and non-disabled—can serve as intellectual
partners to one another. Under such partnerships, teachers encourage students to
make their thinking visible to one another through talk, visual representations, materials,
or dramatic enactments (Cobb-Morocco, 2001).
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Lighting the Flame of Learning
for Students with Disabilities
Active classrooms provide students with rich socially mediated learning experiences
that invite a variety of perspectives from all students—disabled and non-disabled. Thus,
an active classroom creates a learning environment where students can collaboratively
build knowledge by searching for connections among diverse pieces of information and
by negotiating the meaning of the results. For example, research has shown that
opportunities for students to use active classrooms to present and discuss their own work
with other students, or become involved in a class-wide activities, e.g. a class activote,
improves their attention and engagement in the learning process (BECTA, 2003; Burden,
2002; Miller & Glover, 2002).
Central to these student interactions are active classroom features that allow students
to annotate, conceal, manipulate, move and zoom in on or focus on images, including
text (Bell, 2002; Levy, 2002; Thomas, 2003). For example, students in one study used
the interactive whiteboard to manipulate and color in visual images that resulted in
better understanding of fractions and percentages, measurement of angles, and
transformation of shapes (Edwards et al., 2002).
This is the reason Kennewell (2001) argues that teachers must allow students to use
IWBs themselves. Active classrooms in an interactive group-setting motivate students
because the students’ interactions within the context of IWB features make lessons
more enjoyable and interesting, resulting in improved attention and behavior essential to
learning (Beeland, 2002).
Disabled students’ communicative interactions in an active classroom can occur in
either written or spoken language or a combination of both. At the simplest level, an
active classroom can extend student participation to even those physically impaired by
giving them access to an Activ Wand and an Activ Slate—a wireless mouse and a radio
controlled tablet that allows students to interact with the IWB.
The IWB can also assist the visually and hearing impaired, as well as those with
physical challenges, severe and multiple disorders and other health impairments. A
disabled student whose visual capacity is diminished would benefit from the large size
of the IWB screen. IWBs also have a zoom feature to magnify whatever is on the
screen. The Activboard has the ability to change background and text colors. Teachers
can also record instructions for lesson play back to the students. In addition, class
notes may be printed and handed to a Braille translator for a student that is blind or
notes may be printed for the hearing impaired student who has difficulty taking notes
while trying to read lips.
Students that are confined to a bed at home could benefit from the distance learning
capabilities of IWB-based technology during the time they are unable to attend school.
The ideal distance learning configuration would allow the student to view everything the
teacher writes on the IWB, plus hear the teacher/student class discussions. Moreover,
disabled students confined to the bed at home would be able to contribute their ideas
and comments verbally as well as visually by writing back to the IWB through their
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Lighting the Flame of Learning
for Students with Disabilities
computer. Thus, social mediated interactions among students—disabled and nondisabled—can be extended beyond the classroom.
Engagement in Constructive Conversations.
Constructive conversations build understanding as students participate in talk that
makes their thinking visible and encourages them to connect, compare, contrast, and
negotiate different understandings (Cobb-Morocco, 2001).
In Active classrooms, teachers can easily create situations where students can express
their questions and ideas as well as assimilate other’s perspectives into their thinking.
Through their own conversations with students and the ones they encourage among
students, teachers in Active classrooms are able to help students practice and
internalize ways of thinking that support understanding.
Walker-Tileston (2004) argues that children learn best through their dominant senses,
seeing, hearing and touching. Active classrooms are multisensory and can appeal to all
three senses simultaneously through a variety of visual representations, sounds and the
capacity to interact with the board. Thus, the IWB enables students to engage with subject
materials in a way that focuses on their individual strengths (Bell, 2002; Wood, 2001).
The challenge to educators in successfully educating disabled students is access to
organized, relevant, engaging, authentic, and comprehensible yet demanding materials.
Active classrooms make access to learning materials more efficiently than print media
because disabled students create stronger memory links to materials through multimedia
presentations that combine visual, audio, and text than a single medium alone. IWBs
also allow instant and accurate playbacks, which help disabled students access specific
segments of material much more easily. Video materials presented through IWBs can
also bring natural and context-rich linguistic and cultural materials to disabled students
while the Internet—accessed through an IWB—can enable disabled students to access
authentic news and literature.
Constructive conversations can also take place over student work. Feedback and active
evaluation of learning furthers students’ understanding and skill development. The result
is that teachers of students with disabilities need to incorporate short-cycle
assessments into the lesson plan that provides special needs students some measure
of how they are progressing through the learning process. Active classrooms can also
provide disabled students with helpful feedback that can enhance students’ learning.
Active classrooms can give special needs students instant feedback to questions
through the formative assessment capabilities built into the Activ software that can
analyze student responses to questions for teachers to review with students to identify
opportunities for re-learning that leads to student success (Miller & Glover, 2002;
Richardson, 2002). This assessment capability also allows the teacher to reteach key
concepts not grasped by the student in real time.
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Lighting the Flame of Learning
for Students with Disabilities
Recommendations for Educators and Technology Decision Makers
The purpose for using IWBs in the classroom is to enable access to and use of digital
resources for the benefit of the whole class—including students with disabilities—while
preserving the role of the teacher in guiding and monitoring learning. Active classrooms
support many effective strategies relevant to students with disabilities, such as using
nonlinguistic representation, helping students recognize patterns, giving them
opportunities to practice communicating complex ideas, allowing teachers to participate
in instructional chat rooms, and bringing their home culture into the classroom through
digital images, music, and other media. This is the challenge with technology: to make
sure disabled students are not segregated by virtue of their being unable, through the
lack of accessible information technology, to access the world of learning opportunities
available via technology.
Still, educators should take great care when planning for an active classroom. One of
the most frequent issues raised by both teachers and students is the need for adequate
training in order to use IWBs to their full potential. Teachers’ inexperience in setting up
equipment and in manipulating features on the board, leading to lesson disruption is a
concern for both teachers and students (Levy, 2002). Teacher buy-in into the use of
IWBs in the classroom is another issue. Some researchers have highlighted that even
when a teacher initially commits to use IWBs as a transformative pedagogic tool, lack of
practical and methodological training can impede and frustrate such noble intentions
(Burden, 2002).
Nevertheless, teachers and students consistently report high levels of enthusiasm for
Active classrooms. Thus, technology decision makers need to ensure that such
enthusiasm from teachers and students can be translated into effective and purposeful
practice. IWB technology should be used in unique and creative ways above and
beyond that which is possible when teaching with normal whiteboards or other
projection methods. In this process, students with disabilities would have a better
chance at keeping up with their non-disabled peers, who, in turn would develop a better
understanding about their classmates with disabilities. Such a result is the promise of
Active classrooms that are accessible to disabled students, appropriately infused into
teachers’ instructional strategies. Put simply, the uniqueness of IWB technology lies in
the possibility for an intersection between technical and pedagogic interactivity. At this
intersection lies the possibility of lighting the flame of learning for students with
disabilities.
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Lighting the Flame of Learning
for Students with Disabilities
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Lighting the Flame of Learning
for Students with Disabilities
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