Abstract
The current paper aims at the development of a mobile educational application for enhancing cognitive and language skills of children with disabilities. During their development, they receive a variety of stimuli that influence and shape these skills. Therefore, they should be helped and supported as much as possible with all available means, such as ICT tools. Additionally, the identification of language and cognitive disorders is a major challenge to special education teachers. It is thus important to develop a specially designed application aiming at the enhancement of skills of children with disabilities and will be available to all stakeholders (special education teachers, children, parents). For the evaluation, an intervention was designed in collaboration with two special education teachers and took place in a training center for children with disabilities in Thessaloniki (Greece), called Redditus. The results were very promising, since children with disabilities greatly improved their skills during the intervention. Moreover, a semi-struc,*tured interview was carried out with the two teachers. They supported that it is useful, simple to use, enjoyable, fun and innovative. Summarizing, the proposed application could be an auxiliary support tool to special education teachers in order children with disabilities to improve their cognitive and language skills.
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Authors wish to thank all children as well as special education teachers who took part in this study. This study would not have been made possible without their valuable participation and contribution.
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Gerakis, M., Volioti, C. (2022). A Mobile Educational Application for Enhancing Cognitive and Language Skills of Children with Disabilities. In: Auer, M.E., Tsiatsos, T. (eds) New Realities, Mobile Systems and Applications. IMCL 2021. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 411. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96296-8_39
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