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• Impact on Special Needs Students brochure

The ActivClassroom Impact on Special Needs Students

Active classrooms provide students with rich socially mediated learning experiences that invite a variety of perspectives from all students—disabled and non-disabled. Thus, an active classroom creates a learning environment where students can collaboratively build knowledge by searching for connections among diverse pieces of information and by negotiating the meaning of the results. For example, research has shown that opportunities for students to use active classrooms to present and discuss their own work with other students, or become involved in a class-wide activities, e.g. a class activote, improves their attention and engagement in the learning process (BECTA, 2003; Burden, 2002; Miller & Glover, 2002).

Central to these student interactions are active classroom features that allow students to annotate, conceal, manipulate, move and zoom in on or focus on images, including text (Bell, 2002; Levy, 2002; Thomas, 2003). For example, students in one study used the interactive whiteboard to manipulate and color in visual images that resulted in better understanding of fractions and percentages, measurement of angles, and transformation of shapes (Edwards et al., 2002).

This is the reason Kennewell (2001) argues that teachers must allow students to use IWBs themselves. Active classrooms in an interactive group-setting motivate students because the students’ interactions within the context of IWB features make lessons more enjoyable and interesting, resulting in improved attention and behavior essential to learning (Beeland, 2002).