The number of the handicapped individuals in Turkey is approximately 8,5 million (ÖZİDA, 2002). These people, 3,5 million of whom are children, need special education (Pekuslu, 2007). The number is quite high in all around Europe as Turkey. Special education is the type of education provided to the children who cannot sufficiently benefit from the education environment which their peers receive. In the project we aim to create a “Web Based Education Platform” for special education as an open educational resource (OER) for all teachers, administrators, parents and students in the field to promote the quality of the education they are dealing with at partner countries. We also intend to meet 290 objectives and their sub-attainments defined by the Special Education and Guidance and Counselling Services Directorship and create a new practice for disadvantaged groups which may result in reducing the rate of early school dropouts. The project will also have an impact on parents and teachers. We will improve the competences of special education teachers in their fields and help parents of handicapped individuals to support special education by integrating them directly into the learning process. To achieve these, we set up a team of 6 partners who are experts in their respective areas. They will play an instrumental role in the creation of the Intellectual Outputs as well as the project activities. There will be 4 Transnational Project Meetings, 5 Multiplier Events in different countries and 5 Intellectual Outputs created. 1.Blue Special Learning Management System 2. Educational Content 3. Animations For Educational Objectives 4.Games 5. Voiceover Work The aim of the multiplier events will introduce the LMS and enable them to learn how to use it, test it and contribute to the revisons and updates. In this respect the partcipants will be mainly special education teachers working for Ministry of National Education, Trainers at Special Education Centers supported by the Ministry of Education and parents who have a child with any kind of learning disability. Each organisation will directly work with 50 students with learning disability by implementing the OER in Special Education. There is no doubt that only if the deep interdisciplinary collaboration of Instructional technology and education can result in an effective result of success. In this respect ICT integration will be our core methodology in the project. Also Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) which is an invaluable educational method in Special Education will be used during the project. The participants of the project are mainly Special Education Teachers, Handicapped Students and parents of these students. LMS created as the output of the project will be introduced to these participants limitless free as they will be open and online access. Project will serve approximately 10,5 million people if only the parents of the handicapped students are added, and if teachers, health care providers, experts are added, this figure becomes even greater. Also the number is propotionally high when taking into account that the LMS will be used in the countries of partner organisations. The figures given above are related only to Turkey. The education portal to be prepared will also be translated into English, Duthc and Romanian. Romania has similiar problems in special education as in Turkey. In Bucharest and nearby, the number of children in need of special education is 631.199 in 2008 (Katowice, 2013). Through dissemination that is prepared in detail nationwide and internationally, we expect at least 20 million people will be able to make use of the program. Our project meets the priorities of Education and Training 2020 as it will improve the quality of education at different levels by integrating disadvantaged groups into curriculum. It will also help target groups to reach OER developed by our project as well as providing ICT integration into education for disadvantaged groups. Europass and certificates obtained during the project activities will help skills and qualifications to be recognized. By achieving this, we firmly believe that we will provide an innovative open educational resource in digital era which will result in supporting schools and rehabilitation centers to tackle early school dropouts. OER will also be used by the parents, teachers, disadvantaged students and other stakeholders.
In Turkey the number of people with disabilities is approximately 8,5 million (ÖZİDA 2002). 3,5 million of them are consisted of children and they require special education (PEKUSLU&KAYACI,2007). If those children are considered as if they had a family which has got at least 2 members, the number of individuals who are affected by it primarily reach at least 10,5 milllion. This number goes up by higher amounts when the stuff taking care of these children such as educater, sanitarian etc has been taken into consideration. It can clearly be seen how much special education is important even looking from this perspective. Children with special needs have limited attention span and their attention can easily be distracted. They have difficulty in understanding words or concepts. The studies Show that computer assisted learning increases the motivation level of disabled students and it enables them to increase their attention span so that they enjoy studying. Also the studies comparing the contents of traditional education programs and computer assisted program shows that computer assisted programs are more effective in learning process of children with special needs. With the help of Computer Assisted Programs, disabled children can become active members of society who can sustain a social and occupational life independently. Blue Platform is a complete free of charge platform that is available for all children with special needs, their parents and their teachers. Target audience of this project are the individuals with special needs, the ones with medium-heavy mental deficiency and the ones with autism spectrum disorder. In 2018 National Ministry of Education renovated the curriculum of individuals with medium-heavy mental deficiency and autism spectrum disorder. Blue Platform has been designed according to this new curricula. Blue Platform includes the targets of levels and syllabus on the list down below. Level 1: Maths, Reading and Writing Skills, Social Skills, Social Studies Level 2: Maths, Reading and Writing Skills, Social Skills, Daily Life Skills Level 3: Maths, Reading and Writing Skills, Communication and Social Skills, Independent Living Skills The main goal of Blue Platform is to make a contribution to the equality of opportunity in special education. Blue Platform is totally free of charge and will always remain free of charge. IMPARK, one of the partner institutions which has built the engineering sytem of our project stated that they would carry on saving the system on their servers as long as the company exist. This statement added priceless value to the project in term of sustainability and upgradablity. Blue Platform is designed for being used as a supplementary material. The way how you use it is very simple. Pupils can use it with the help of their teachers or parents an deven by themselves in an easy way. Blue Platform is a web based Learning Management System (LMS). It does not require set-up. It is available on every smarts board or computer with internet connection. Training screens starts with learning section and after that part it carries on with the reinforcement part. After they cover the lessons, some reinforcement tools such as games, songs, animations, stories etc. that are to achieve the goals of the lessons appear on the screen. There are school module, teacher module and parent module sections. Intellectual Outputs: O1/Blue Special LMS: The first intellectual output of the project, LMS, is the core of Blue Platform. O2/Learning Contents: The learning contents of Blue Platform that engineering studies has been carried out in the previous output, have been prepared in O2 part. O3/Preparing Animations for Educational Objectives: Animation added to Blue Platform has been prepared on O3 intellectual output. It is not only limited with animations, plenty of videos were also prepared. O4/Preparing Games for Educational Objectives: Assistive technology in the field of education opens greater opportunities for disabled children to become fully active members in learning period. Didactic computer games are also one of them. Games being added to Blue Platform has been prepared on O4. O5/Vocalizations: Vocalizations of Blue Platform has been done on O5. Pilot scheme of Blue Platform has started on 28th May 2018 with the participation of more than 70 special education teachers from 20 different cities. With the help of feedbacks received from the teachers, optimizations and refinements have been done. All the results of survey on pilot scheme are available on official website of our project. Under the theme of Universal Design in Information Technologies, BİLTEVT2019, the International Barrier-Free Informatics Congress held on between 11-13th September 2019 with inter-institutional cooperation hosted by Maltepe University. Blue Platform was granted Barrier-Free Informatics Award. For being our first award really precious to us, it gave much more determination to work on our project.