EJEL Volume 6 Issue 3
October 2008
Reinventing Papert’s Constructionism - Boosting Young Children’s Writing Skills with e-Learning Designed for Dyslexics
Karin Tweddell Levinsen
University of Aarhus Copenhagen Denmark
Since the consent to the Salamanca Statement on special needs education from 1994, e-learning
developers have focused on tools aimed to support dyslexic learners and ICT, and e-learning is
now widely used in special needs education. However, the Statement also inspired the vision of
The Spacious School and the idea that children with learning disabilities should be included in
the ordinary classes in primary schools. At first, the children with special needs were present in
the classroom with their compensational aid, e.g. e-learning, ICT and special teacher support, and
rarely included in the socially organised learning activities. Consequently, class teachers and subject
teachers were not aware of the existence and potentials of the special compensational tools.
In recent years in Denmark, ICT has changed from being present to everyday availability.
That is, ICT and computers move out of the computer rooms. I.e. most pupils use ICT,
e-learning and computers in various contexts when it seems convenient. The increasing
use of ICT has paved the way for new ways of including children with special educational
needs. Knowledge of dyslexic compensational tools was earlier restricted to the special
teachers, but now teachers in general are aware of their existence. In a large scale research
project in Danish primary schools, this change of awareness led to teacher-initiated experiments
with special needs software in first and second grades. The teachers wanted to see whether these
tools could inspire normal children as well as children with special educational needs to start
writing their own stories.
The paper presents the research findings from the empirical studies of
experiments in Second Grade. It concludes that most children in the experiments wrote longer
and more complex stories than normally expected from this age-group. The children with a visual
learning style in particular demonstrated a significant progress.
Keywords:
e-learning, writing skills, reading skills, storytelling, dyslexics, special needs, it support
Download FULL PAPER
Back to Contents
