Boosting Young Children's Writing Skills With Compensational e-Learning Designed for Dyslexics

Since the consent to the Salamanca Statement on special needs education from 1994, e-learning developers have focused on tools aimed at supporting dyslexic learners. The importance of these efforts is at display every year in the Special Aids exhibition area at the BETT-event in London. In the special needs education for dyslexics, ICT and e-learning is now widely used. However, the Salamanca Statement also inspired the vision of The Spacious School and the idea that children with learning disabilities should be transferred from special classes and included in the ordinary classes in primary schools. In the beginning of this process, the children with special needs were present in the classroom with their compensational e-learning, ICT and special teacher support, and they were not always included in the socially organised learning activities. Consequently, class teachers and subject teachers were not aware of the existence and potentials of the compensational e-learning and ICT tools. In recent years in Denmark, ICT has moved from being present in schools to becoming an available, everyday resource. That is, it and computers have begun to move out of the computer rooms and most pupils use ICT, e-learning and computers in various contexts when ever it seems convenient. The wider use of it in schools has opened for new ways of including the children with special educational needs and while knowledge of dyslexic compensational e-learning and ICT tools was earlier restricted to the special teachers, teachers in general have now become aware of their existence. Within the frame of a large scale research project in primary schools in Denmark (Project IT and Learning - PIL), this change of awareness led to teacher-initiated experiments with the Danish e-learning special needs-software CD Ord 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. The paper concludes that most children in the experiments wrote longer and more complex stories than normally expected from this age-group. And especially the children displaying a visual learning style demonstrated a step progress.