ABSTRACT
Inclusive classes comprised of students with special educational needs (SEN) as well as typically developing students are increasingly becoming fixtures of the twenty-first century school. Educators and the research community are therefore finding themselves challenged to devise more effective and diverse tools in order to provide SEN children with greater opportunities to acquire academic skills while preparing them for successful transition to adulthood. The individual-differences principle states that the design effects of multimedia technologies may meet the needs of students who have different cognitive capacities. Computerised learning environments may serve as more effective support tools for the instruction of SEN students precisely because they are characterised by multiple representations of knowledge. Van Dijken, Bus and de Jong examine the contribution of the Dutch website Bereslim which provides digital picture storybooks for three- to seven-year-old at-risk children. Parsons and Cobb review the research published over the past 10 years to assess how virtual reality (VR) has been explored in the field.
