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.

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.

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.