Enhancing Communication between Children and Parents – A Story of Participation in Special Education

Other conference contribution, 2016

This paper tells the story of an initial project aiming to investigate how assistive technology can support increased communication between the children with intellectual disabilities in the Special Education school and their parents. In the story, an interactive prototype is developed through user-involvement of children with intellectual disabilities, their teachers and parents. The prototype is tablet-based diary for the children of a Special Education school, and a web portal from which parents and teachers can follow the children's diary entries. The prototype shows promising results in terms of enhancing communication. In the story, we have highlighted a few first experiences from involving children, parents and teachers in design in the special education context. These experiences have been inspiring for our continued work, and hopefully these contributions can serve as inspiration for others.