One of the biggest challenges in any special education environment is the fact that different kids have different learning challenges or disabilities. One child may have directional issues while another child may have neuromotor challenges and another child may have cognitive problems and so on down the line. The big problem with typical and traditional educational set up is that you only have a one-to-many educational system. In other words, the lesson would originate from the teacher and it would be broadcast out to the group of students.
The problem is in a special education setting, this doesn’t work because while one child may be cognitively okay but have other problems, another child may have cognitive problems and may be otherwise okay so how do you make the traditional one-to-many approach work in a traditional classroom setting? The answer is you don’t that’s why special education tended to be quite expensive because it needed a lot of tweaks and a lot of customization. The good news is that with the rise of the iPad, a lot of the expense and logistical nightmares of instructing kids with special needs disappears. How? Special apps.
The great thing with the iPad is that each kid can have an iPad with a special blend or combination of apps that deal directly with the child’s specific learning challenges. As a result, the teacher, instead of acting as the actual teacher and a source of information for all the children, acts more like the coordinator among the different apps that each child interacts with. As a result, the teacher can do a better job of tracking the effectiveness of these apps while providing a one to one learning environment. This is huge. There are different tools like Tabcam and online video that allows pretty much customized educational experiences for students.
This has a tremendous application in the special education field but it also has possibly earth shattering implications for the general education field. One of the biggest criticisms of general education is that a teacher can’t really teach a whole mass of students whether those students are twenty or one hundred in number. With the rise of the iPad or cheaper tablet technology, this goes away. You are able to create a specialized and customized learning experience that might really take education to a whole new other level.