New Communication Technologies for Inclusive Education in and outside the Classroom

This chapter explores new communication technologies and methods for avoiding accessibility and communication barriers in the educational environment. It is focused on providing real-time captions so students with hearing disabilities and foreign students, among others, could participate in an inclusive way in and outside the classroom. The inclusive proposals are based on the APEINTA educational project, which aims for accessible education for all. The research work proposes the use of mobile devices for teacher and students in order to provide more flexibility using the APEINTA real-time captioning service. This allows using this service from anywhere and at anytime, not only in the classroom.

Towards the Use of Dialog Systems to Facilitate Inclusive Education

Continuous advances in the development of information technologies have currently led to the possibility of accessing learning contents from anywhere, at anytime, and almost instantaneously. However, accessibility is not always the main objective in the design of educative applications, specifically to facilitate their adoption by disabled people. Different technologies have recently emerged to foster the accessibility of computers and new mobile devices, favoring a more natural communication between the student and the developed educative systems. This chapter describes innovative uses of multimodal dialog systems in education, with special emphasis in the advantages that they provide for creating inclusive applications and learning activities.

School Activities Using Handmade Teaching Materials with Dot Codes

Practitioners have been using three communication aids in conducting many school activities at both special needs and regular schools. In the simplest system, voices and sounds are transformed into dot codes, edited with pictures and text, and printed out with an ordinary color printer; the printed dot codes are traced to be decoded into the originals by using a handy tool, Sound Reader. In the most complex system, in addition to audio files, multiple media files such as movies, web pages, html files, and PowerPoint files can be linked to each dot code; just touching the printed dot code with sound or scanner pens reproduces their audio or multimedia, respectively. The present chapter reports the software and hardware used in developing originally handmade teaching materials with dot codes and various school activities performed at both special needs and regular schools.

Analyzing the Level of Inclusion of Digital Educational Objects in Eskola 2.0

The Basque Government has published two calls to create digital educational objects for the programme called Eskola 2.0. After having provided schools with technological equipment, these calls aim to increase the use of learning technology in the classroom. More than 300 didactic sequences have been developed, which vary greatly in visual design, content structure, organization, and pedagogical aspects. Even though accessibility is one of the quality criteria, the reality is that they are hardly accessible and inclusive. DeustoTech Learning research group has carried out a survey of the educational objects approved in these calls up to November 2011. The authors evaluated pedagogical and technological aspects to find out how inclusive they are. In this chapter, they provide the results of the survey and propose a set of guidelines for designing more accessible and inclusive objects in the future.

On the Use of Speech Technologies to Achieve Inclusive Education for People with Intellectual Disabilities

New technologies have demonstrated a great potential to improve the social, labour, and educational integration of people with special needs. That is why there is a special interest of academia and industry to develop tools to assist this people, improving their autonomy and quality of life. Usually, intellectual disabilities are linked with speech and language disorders. In this chapter, the authors present a review on the efforts directed towards designing and developing speech technologies adapted to people with intellectual disabilities. Also, they describe the work they have conducted to study how to gather speech resources, which can be used to build speech-based systems that help them to communicate more effectively.

Eye-Gaze and Facial Expressions as Feedback Signals in Educational Interactions

In this chapter, the authors explore possibilities to use novel face and gaze tracking technology in educational applications, especially in interactive teaching agents for second language learning. They focus on non-verbal feedback that provides information about how well the speaker has understood the presented information, and how well the interaction is progressing. Such feedback is important in interactive applications in general, and in educational systems, it is effectively used to construct a shared context in which learning can take place: the teacher can use feedback signals to tailor the presentation appropriate for the student. This chapter surveys previous work, relevant technology, and future prospects for such multimodal interactive systems. It also sketches future educational systems which encourage the students to learn foreign languages in a natural and inclusive manner, via participating in interaction using natural communication strategies.

Educational Applications of Clickers in University Teaching

The purpose of this chapter is to contextualize the situation of the use of remote response devices or clickers in education and identify the benefits that tools such as Q-Click software can bring to university teaching and to different groups of students. To fulfil this objective, the authors conducted research in classes with students who rated 149 different aspects related to the use of such software, including its use in class, benefits, and implications for follow-up assessment of the subject, attention, and class quality. This information was then compared to other groups of students studying the same subject who did not use clickers in class. The findings confirm the original proposal verifying the usefulness of these tools in university teaching for the important consequences for students and teachers.

A Proposal to Model Interaction from the Analysis of Student - Pedagogic Conversational Agent Logs

According to User-Centered Design, computer interactive systems should be implemented taking into account the users’ preferences. However, in some cases, it is not easy to apply conventional Human-Computer interaction evaluation techniques to identify the users’ needs and improve the user-system interaction. Therefore, this chapter proposes a procedure to model the interaction behaviour from the analysis of conversational agent dialog logs. A case study in which the procedure has been applied to model the behaviour of 20 children when interacting with multiple personality Pedagogic Conversational Agents is described as an illustrative sample of the goodness and practical application of the procedure.

Education for Inclusion Using Virtual Worlds

In this chapter, the authors present an introduction to the use of virtual worlds in education, an analysis of the stronger and weaker points that such environments offer for high school education, and an experience on applying such technologies for the inclusion at a concrete high school in Cunit (Spain). In this high school, there is a need for teaching immigrant children the Catalan language when they arrive, in order to allow them to continue their studies integrated with the rest of the students. The chapter describes an experience on using virtual worlds for achieving such goal, based on the open software platform called “OpenSim.”

Experiences Using a Free Tool for Voice Therapy Based on Speech Technologies

This chapter reports the results after two years of deployment of PreLingua, a free computer-based tool for voice therapy, in different educational institutions. PreLingua gathers a set of activities that use speech processing techniques and an adapted interface to train patients who present speech development delays or special voice needs in the environment of special education. Its visual interface is especially designed for children with cognitive disabilities and maps relevant voice parameters like intensity, vocal onset, durations of sounds, fundamental frequency, and formant frequencies to visually attractive graphics. Reports of successful results of the use of PreLingua have been gathered in several countries by audiologists, speech therapists, and other professionals in the fields of voice therapy, and also, in other fields such as early stimulation, mutism, and attention-deficit disorders. This chapter brings together the experiences of these professionals on the use of the tool and how the use of an interface paradigm that maps acoustic features directly to visual elements in a screen can provide improvements in voice disorders in patients with cognitive and speech delays.