2.1 Research with Young Learners with Special Needs
The part of the study described in this paper took place from January – June of 2012.
The iPad was considered as a cool piece of technology, and Norwegian schools were just starting to adopt it as a learning tool [26]. An elementary school was interested in
assessing the iPad as a tool to stimulate learning in their special education class.
The group we worked with consisted of a small class of 6 boys aged 8-12, a
teacher, and two assistant teachers, one of whom was dedicated to one of students
with extra needs. Each student had received an iPad equipped with the same
applications as the rest of the children at school. However, none of the apps could be
used for teaching as our group of children had different abilities and competence
levels. The teacher was interested in finding out if an app could be designed that
would fit all the students in the class.
We had prior experience with app design for a whole class [27] in a regular
classroom. On our first visit to the class, we engaged the children in simple and fun
iPad games, observed what they did with the iPad on their own, and talked to their
teachers. All the children could use the iPad as a device: they could open apps,
regulate volume, size of images and text, etc. On the other hand, problems related to
understanding of what a selected app does or actions available to them were
immediately apparent and prevented the children from using the apps according to
their goals. This visit was followed by a long interview with the main teacher about
specific issues and problems for each student, as well as how the class functions as a
whole. The main finding from this interview was that in spite of the fact that the boys
have been going to the same class for years; there was little feeling of being a group.
Information about cognitive, social and physical development levels of each student,
to the level pertinent to our project, was given to us. We categorized the issues we
heard about and found out that they are comparable to those in Livingstone [9, p. 22].
The students had education/economic disadvantage, psychological disadvantages,
disabilities (some of them) and social disadvantages. Further, they exhibited
behavioral problems, impulse control problems, social problems and, according to the
teacher, most relevantly, concentration problems.