Moscow’s Disabled Children Learn with Multimedia

Profiles in Success: Moscow

Over a thousand of Moscow’s most physically disabled children are being given their first education opportunities, using Apple multimedia tools. An innovative distance learning project provides tailored teaching, and motivation to prepare for work and life, to children unable to attend special schools in the city and with poor prospects for the future.

Key to the project’s success is multimedia technology. It offers flexibility to meet the individual needs of children with a wide spectrum of disabilities. According to Mrs Elena Bulin-Sokolova, CEO of the Centre for Information Technologies and Learning Environments: “Apple’s sound, image and video tools give new learning options to children with severe hearing, sight and mobility difficulties.”

Started in 2003, the distance learning project is an important contribution by Moscow’s city education department to solving a major problem of disadvantage in the community. Some 15,000 students attend special schools in the city, but around 4,000 children are either too disabled or cannot afford the transport to take advantage of the schools’ facilities. As a result the excluded children have substandard or no education, further limiting their working opportunities.

Technology has now given many children in this group the chance to learn at home. Using an open source e-learning platform, they can receive lesson plans and interact with other students and teachers to share learning problems and reinforce their achievements.

“We try to use a standard subject curriculum as much as we can, but obviously the children’s needs vary a great deal, so the lesson plans are adapted according to individual abilities,” says Elena Bulin-Sokolova, whose Centre trains the teachers and manages the project.

“One of the most important goals is to motivate the children to learn, so that they can go on to further training where possible, and get jobs so that their lives are fulfilled and their living standards grow,” she says.

We needed technology that would be easy for the teachers and the students to operate. It had to be robust when used with all kinds of equipment, like a specialist mouse or keyboard, because we cannot support every student if the system crashes. We also knew that multimedia was very important for the project, and we think that Apple has the best in built multimedia software.

Mrs Elena Bulin-Sokolova, CEO of the Centre for Information Technologies and Learning Environments, Moscow

The project depends on both the creativity of 230 teachers and the technology that they deploy. Teachers are drawn from all subject disciplines in local schools, and few have any direct experience in distance learning teaching or in working with physically handicapped children.

Many of the youngsters are experiencing structured teaching and learning programmes for the first time in their lives, and the challenge for the teachers is to find the right ways to move them forward.

“We are talking about some kids here who can only use eye movement to communicate,” says Elena Bulin-Sokolova. “Others might have good mobility but have total sight or hearing loss. So the teaching materials and the tools we use have to reflect big differences in capabilities.”

The teachers receive intensive training at the Centre, as the trainers themselves learn more from experience in developing learning materials for remote education, and specifically for children with a range of disabilities. The teachers also learn how to use multimedia techniques in their lesson plans, and how to help the children use their iBook laptops.

“The Centre is very experienced in training teachers how to use ICT,” says Elena Bulin-Sokolova. “Each year we train more than 10,000 teachers to use technology in the classroom, but training for distance learning was very new for us, in Moscow and in Russia.”