As I work as a special needs teacher, I thought I would reflect on the importance of digitalisation from the perspective of special needs education. Overall, digitalisation has brought significant changes to special needs education in schools. The development of technology has opened up new opportunities for adapting and personalising teaching, but it also brings challenges. Here, I will write about some of the implications of digitalisation for special needs education that come to mind, its benefits and drawbacks, and its impact on life and work in the future.

In my own experience, one of the clear benefits of digitalisation has been the ability to enrich, adapt and personalise teaching through a variety of learning platforms, learning games and learning environments. In my own experience, students love different games. It’s also quite easy to make learning materials yourself using different applications and digital tools. For example, I use these to make picture communication pictures and stories. There is also a wide range of digital software and aids available for different learning difficulties or physical challenges (e.g. for visually impaired, autistic pupils and so on).

Digitalisation has also made it possible to deliver education in a wider variety of ways. Distance learning, which began during the COVID pandemic, has continued in some form to this day. Particularly for pupils who have never been to school, distance or hybrid learning has been a lifesaver. Digitalisation has also made it much easier to organise various networking meetings and conferences. Digitalisation has also revolutionised the way work-related records are kept and documents are drawn up. Stricter data protection regulations have also changed the way so-called paperwork is done. All paperwork is now done in a system. The much-maligned Wilma system is one of them. In some schools, communication relies almost exclusively on Wilma, which I do not think is a good thing. Work phones and direct contact with carers works best in my opinion. Particularly when it comes to often difficult issues and a written message can give the wrong impression. All in all, digitalisation has become an integral part of education. Monitoring and assessment of learning and feedback (recorded) is also done in different systems. Exams are also digitally administered, sometimes giving pupils immediate feedback on their performance.

I think that one of the obvious disadvantages of digitalisation is that pupils no longer make an effort to learn themselves. Answers are often easily found on the internet, which reduces pupils’ basic skills and ability to think. I am therefore concerned that younger and younger children are too attached to their mobile phones and other digital devices. Children’s and young people’s brains have not yet developed enough to process the huge amount of data that is available today.  Perseverance is also a vanishing resource, where more effort used to be put into things. Many pupils also no longer do anything with their hands in their free time or get enough exercise, and the use of imagination is also disappearing. Pupils may also become dependent on technology. It is clear that digitalisation is here to stay. What is needed now is a balance between the digital and the real world.

GDPR

Let’s take a brief look at the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force in 2018 to protect the personal data of EU citizens and harmonise data protection practices across the Union. The GDPR applies to all organisations that process personal data of EU residents, regardless of where the organisation is located. When this change came in, at least in my workplace at the time, we were trained for it and everyone had to pass a data protection test required by the municipality. In summary, I would say that teachers need to ensure that pupils’ personal data is processed lawfully, appropriately and transparently. Another important factor is that only necessary personal data are collected and processed. In addition, personal data are only kept for as long as necessary. In other words, the old practice of marking personal data in the margins of the calendar is no longer legal.

I think it is a good thing that the data protection regulation was tightened up and clarified. The only clear disadvantage of the tightened GDPR is the transfer of relevant and necessary information from, for example, schools to welfare services (curators, psychologists) and vice versa. The transfer of information is now more the responsibility of carers and sometimes it happens that important information is not transferred at all and the pupil is temporarily excluded from some help. To sum up, the GDPR is reflected in the work of teachers, in particular in more precise requirements and safeguards for the processing of personal data, as well as in increased responsibility for the protection of pupils’ data.

Chat GPT

I have already become a bit familiar with Chat GPT because of the active pupils’ efforts. So I have had to, or have been allowed to, learn about it for purely practical reasons. I tried AI’s questions about digitalisation from a special education perspective and I thought the themes that AI raised in its answers were spot on. I think AI can be used, first and foremost, to give you ideas about what you could write about the topic in question. In other words, AI is an excellent tool for drawing up a “table of contents” or “body”. I have also done some checking of the references provided by the AI and I can say that they are not always correct, and most links do not even open. So, fortunately, AI is not yet a complete substitute for thinking and effort. However, learning also requires hard work.

Self-evaluation

All in all, this was a very rewarding exercise. I especially appreciate the videos with subtitles. My English is so poor (or lack of use) that the subtitles helped me to understand things better. The videos were also thought-provoking, and even a little scary. I was left thinking about the amount of data, cybercrime and many other topics. The question of whether we are able to handle such a huge amount of data is also a question I wonder about in my everyday life as a teacher. One of my students told me that I am the last generation to have experienced life without internet, internet and smart devices. This is true. So I leave you, the reader, with this observation to ponder the idea of where this world is going with digitalisation.