Original, self-made teaching materials with “post-it-like” sticker icons overlaid with dot codes, which can link multimedia such as voices and movies, were created to be used by a third-grade elementary student with speech and language disorders overlapped with moderate intellectual disabilities. The linked voices were replayed by using a speaking pen to touch the sticker icons pasted on the created contents. The speaking pen enabled the student, who found it difficult to express her will and desires to others because of her ambiguous pronunciations, to join class activities in inclusive settings. The simple and handy speaking pen worked well as an indispensable communication aid for her. This chapter briefly presents basic information on multimedia-enabled dot-code technology and describes in detail a case study of its effective use in inclusive settings.

Gifted school activities for students with various disabilities were presented with self-made original content created with newly-developed software—Sound Linker, File Linker, GM Authoring Tool, and Gridmark Content Viewer software—that can handle multimedia-enabled dot codes, originally developed by Gridmark, Inc. Each dot codes can link up to four multimedia mediums—such as a movie—in addition to up to four voices/sounds. Touching dot codes with a speaking-pen enables audio files to be replayed, and touching dot codes with a dot-code reader enables multimedia to be replayed on iOS and Windows OS devices. Software and Post-it® sticker icon overlaid with dot codes and a speaking-pen and dot-code reader are distributed for free to school teachers. All the teachers can now create their own self-made original content and can conduct related school activities without buying any costly software and tools. Basic information on (1) creating original teaching materials using the developed software and (2) its use in schools for students with various difficulties is presented in this chapter.

Three programs, DropTalk, Parent-Teacher Notebook, and SmileNote, were developed by teachers at schools for special needs education to help students with various disabilities, in collaboration with businesses supportive of students with disabilities. DropTalk was developed to help students with nonverbal communication by using Pictogram and text overlaid with voice/sound. A digital-based Parent-Teacher Notebook was developed to share the valuable data on each student between their home and school. The shared data are effectively used to build up individual support plans. SmileNote was developed to help students with nonverbal communication disabilities present their wills, hopes, and desires to the classmates and others. In this chapter, the aims and valuable functions in three software applications are described in detail, and self-made contents created with the software and gifted school activities conducted at several schools for special needs education are depicted.

The teaching of programming and its basic concepts, even to students with disabilities, has a crucial influence on the development of their cognitive functions and blends class lessons with real life. This chapter describes two activities with educational robotics, performed at a school for special needs. In the activities, the students with physical disabilities could nicely operate a wheelchair without bumping into the classmates and dance with moving hands powerfully while expressing the images of the songs; those with intellectual disabilities could learn words describing directions like right, left, go, and back and clarify how many steps the robot could take to reach the destination. These two classes with education robotics provided them with joyful and skillful activities that were quite different to the daily lessons in the existing subjects, and they would benefit from the opportunity to learn additional life skills that are highly applicable to living within society.

本研究では、知的障害特別支援学校において音声による言語表出に困難がある知的障害児に対し、AACツールを導入し、対象児のコミュニケーション行動の変化、および、導入したツールの次年度以降への継続について検討した。サインや具体物での要求や他者への不適切な関わりがある対象児へ、日常的に活用しやすい語彙を選定し、音声ペン、シンボルカード、小型タブレットの3種のAACツールを段階的に導入した。他者への呼名および要求・報告に加え、相手を指定した関わりについての頻度に増加がみられたことから、対象児が他者と関わり自らの意思を表明する方法のひとつとしてAACツールの効果が示唆された。また、導入したツールの活用について、合理的配慮として個別の教育支援計画に記し、個別の指導計画とカスタマイズされた機器を通した引き継ぎを行った結果、2年後の継続した使用につながり、家庭での活用へと広がった。

Original teaching materials with multimedia-enabled dot codes were created for use with students with various disabilities. The “Post-it-like” sticker icons on which dot codes were printed were used there; each sticker icon could be linked with up to four multimedia mediums, in addition to up to four voices/sounds. Touching a dot code icon with a speaking-pen enables audios to be replayed, and touching a dot code icon with a dot-code reader enables multimedia to be replayed. Four software packages to create contents with dot codes were developed by Gridmark Inc. The sticker icons, a speaking-pen and dot-code reader, and software packages are distributed to schoolteachers for free; they can now create original self-made teaching materials for students in their classes. This chapter presents basic information on school activities, performed in promoting sounding out words, learning sound-symbol correspondence, word recognition, and text reading.

The teaching of programming and its basic concepts even to young children has a crucial influence on the development of their cognitive functions and blends the lessons in the class with real life. In this chapter, school activities with educational robotics performed at both the special-needs education school and general public school were described. The students with mild intellectual disabilities and physically handicapped at the special needs school could build the robots nicely using small blocks and move them as they wanted through coding. The intellectual disabled students usually do not have enough long-term memory and are weak in abstraction but could develop the ability to actually understand logical thinking through hands-on learning with educational robotics. Through the present activities, the students including the public school could become aware of various goods around them programmed with coding and connect the learning in class to the real world.

University students go to school several times a week, as voluntary supporters, and help teachers not only conduct lessons, but also create self-made teaching materials with newly developed technologies such as multimedia-enabled dot codes and EPUB 3 eBooks with Read-Aloud. The university students-schoolteachers partnership enables the younger students to learn the required subjects with newly educational technologies. For university students, especially those in the pre-service teacher program, such a collaboration is really effective to not only know the class lessons, but also to encourage them to become teachers. The collaborative research works of the university professor with the ICT business companies are crucial to produce newly creative and gifted software and tools for students with various difficulties. This chapter briefly presents newly developed software and tools used for class lessons, and then it describes fruitful collaboration with schoolteachers in creating self-made teaching materials and conducting activities.

University students go to school several times a week, as voluntary supporters, and help teachers not only conduct lessons, but also create self-made teaching materials with newly developed technologies such as multimedia-enabled dot codes and EPUB 3 eBooks with Read-Aloud. The university students-schoolteachers partnership enables the younger students to learn the required subjects with newly educational technologies. For university students, especially those in the pre-service teacher program, such a collaboration is really effective to not only know the class lessons, but also to encourage them to become teachers. The collaborative research works of the university professor with the ICT business companies are crucial to produce newly creative and gifted software and tools for students with various difficulties. This chapter briefly presents newly developed software and tools used for class lessons, and then it describes fruitful collaboration with schoolteachers in creating self-made teaching materials and conducting activities.

One of the authors (Shigeru Ikuta) has organized a collaborative learning community with schoolteachers to provide reasonable accommodations for students with disabilities using newly developed multimedia-enabled dot codes. He created “Post-It-like” sticker icons on which dot codes were printed; each sticker icon could be linked with up to four multimedia mediums, in addition to up to four voices/sounds. Touching a dot code icon with a speaking-pen enables audios to be replayed and touching a dot code icon with a dot-code reader enables multimedia to be replayed. Four software packages to create self-made contents were developed by Gridmark Inc. The sticker icons, a speaking-pen and dot-code reader, and software packages are distributed to schoolteachers for free; they can now create original teaching materials for students in classes. The present newly developed software and tools are quite useful to support the students with various difficulties in inclusive learning settings.

Grid Onput is a set of novel two-dimensional codes comprising extremely small dots. The present authors recently developed software to overlap the dot codes on the user's designed sheet, to create a content to replay audios, to create a standalone application to replay multimedia, and to create an application to replay multimedia on iPad. Simply touching the dot codes with a speaking-pen and/or a dot-code reader enables users to directly access the corresponding digital information; a maximum of four mediums can be easily linked to each dot code icon. In collaboration with schoolteachers all over the world, one of the authors, Shigeru Ikuta, has been creating a variety of original self-made content and conducting various activities at both general and special needs schools. This chapter outlines the recent development of the state-of-the-art Grid Onput dot code technology and presents basic information regarding the creation of original teaching materials using newly developed software and the use at both general and special needs schools.

Original teaching materials with dot codes were created for use with autistic children with intellectual and expressive language disabilities. One of the authors (S. I.) created “Post-it” sticker icons on which dot codes were printed and shared these with teachers of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Each sticker icon was linked with up to four multimedia mediums of expression, such as a movie, in addition to up to four voices/sounds. Touching a dot code icon with a speaking-pen enables audios to be replayed, and touching a dot code icon with a dot-code reader with Bluetooth functionality enables multimedia to be replayed on iOS and Windows OS devices. New software to create self-made teaching materials with dot codes was developed by Gridmark Inc., with the help of author S. I. Basic information on creating original teaching materials using this newly developed software and its use in schools for students with ASD are presented in this chapter.

By using newly developed software and tools, the present authors have been creating self-made teaching materials and conducting school activities for students with various disabilities. The research project organized by one of the present authors, Shigeru Ikuta, is now

The purpose of this chapter is to assist educators in understanding how to create handmade content to support functional skills, following a multi-step recipe will serve as the example, while the application of dot codes can be applied to other content areas as well as support transfer of skills to the home environment. Students are using the speaking-pen in both the home and classroom conditions to support repeated trials in their natural environment. A succinct description of implementing dot-codes into the classroom to support functional skills specific to individuals with ASD will be shared. This chapter will focus on following a multi-step recipe; however, the implementation can be applied to multiple areas of functional instruction.

Original teaching materials with dot codes, which can be linked to multimedia such as audio, movies, web pages, html files, and PowerPoint files, were created for use with students with disabilities. Hand-crafted original teaching materials can easily be created by the users themselves—for example, by schoolteachers—with newly developed and easy-to-handle software. A maximum of four multimedia files can be linked to each Post-It sticker icon and/or dot codes overlaid with a specially-designed software (GM Authoring Tool), and such multimedia files are replayed with a specially-designed sound pen (G-Speak) and scanner pen (G-Pen Blue) with Bluetooth functionality just by using the pen to touch the Post-It sticker icon and/or the dot codes on the printed document. Many activities using dot code materials have been successfully conducted, especially at special needs schools. Basic information on the creation of these materials—and on their use in schools—is presented in this chapter.

Most of the present authors, the teachers at the School for the Mentally Challenged at Otsuka, University of Tsukuba, have been creating original teaching aids and materials using low-tech and high-tech methods. Original teaching aids created with woodworking and metalworking are usually used for students with an intellectual disability. The original teaching materials with Grid Onput dot code, which could link multimedia, such as audio, movies, web pages, html files, and PowerPoint files were created in collaboration with one of the present authors, Professor Shigeru Ikuta, who organized a large research project, and Gridmark Inc. that developed Grid Onput dot code. The present authors have recently developed a new software program, SmileNote, to help students create presentation slides in expressing their feelings, will, and desires to classmates, teachers, and parents. Basic information on these materials and their use in schools is presented in this chapter.

Original e-book teaching materials containing media overlays were created for use in teaching students with reading disabilities. FUSEe developed by FUSE network, Japan was used to create EPUB 3 e-books, where an audio was replayed with synchronized highlighting of the corresponding text. SMIL language or JavaScript package for iOS, ibooks.js was used to replay the audio reproduction. These EPUB 3 e-books were read effectively with an EPUB 3 reader (for example, iBooks for iOS, and Sony and Kobo Readers for Android). E-books created with special needs school, general school, and Japanese Foreign Language Institute schoolteachers were implemented at many schools for students with reading disabilities and dyslexia. Some assessments of the reading activities were performed to clarify the e-books containing media overlays. Basic information regarding the creation of these e-books and their use in schools is presented in this chapter.