The Future of Education

The social work for children with disabilities requires an integrated intervention to meet their complex needs. Very often, the communication disorders are associated with other disabilities, aggravating the child's relationship with parents, peers and teachers, as well as the learning process. The development of mobile learning over the past two decades, as well as the research on its effectiveness, recommends it for use in the social work, especially in working with children with disabilities. The opportunity to experience the use of a mobile tool for communicating with children with disabilities is offered the social work students through the TESI project: Adaptive Personalized System for Creating Expression Tools in Social Inclusion of Learners and Verbal Communication Disabilities. This project was launched in January 2018 and is an ERASMUS + project, Key Action 3: Support for Policy Reform - Education, Training and Youth, set up by the European Commission and includes four target groups: children with disabilities, their parents, teachers working with these children and future social workers. Our paper presents the needs analysis of the target group of social work students. Their role in the project will be to learn how to use the TESI tool, using it in working with children with communication disorders and promoting m-learning through their colleagues and in their future professional practice, to increase the chances of social inclusion of children with disabilities.

This work is supported by the ERASMUS+ KA3 Project: Adaptive Personalized System for Creating Expression Tools in Social Inclusion of Learners with Verbal Communication Disabilities – TESI, No. 592177-EPP-1-2017-1-BG-EPPKA3-IPI-SOC-IN.

Keywords: Communication disorders, children with disability, need analysis, m-learning;

References:
[1] Cathi Draper Rodríguez & Therese M. Cumming (2017) Employing mobile technology to improve language skills of young students with language-based disabilities, Assistive Technology, 29:3, 161-169
[2] M. Cerban, G. E. Iacobescu, Identification of the target groups' needs for an efficient social inclusion of people with communication deficiencies by m-learning, The Future of Education Conference, Florence (Italy),  2018.
[3] Iacobescu, G. E. (2018) Adaptive Personalized System for Creating Expression Tools in Social Inclusion of Learners with Verbal Communication Disabilities - TESI project, 12th annual International Technology, Education and Development Conference, Valencia, Spain.
[4] Ismaili, J. & Ibrahimi, E.H.O. Mobile learning as alternative to assistive technology devices for special needs students, Educ Inf Technol (2017) 22: 883
[5] UNESCO (2013) Policy guidelines for mobile learning, UNESCO, Paris