Extraordinary Children

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9 November 2006: This page is still work in progress.

Extraordinary Children and New Mobility

An extraordinary child in our book is one who is not quite like the others and may have rather different mobility requirements. To give you a feel for this let us look briefly at one example of a small project that is presently under discussion with a French middle school.

New Mobility project to assist children with Down's Syndrome

Here are some quick working notes on this in English on this project under discussion for a special unit in a French Middle School.

Title of project? New Mobility and autonomy for children with special problems and limited autonomy.

The idea is to develop with the school and the team running the program a small demonstration project in support of a special unit within a middle school in Paris, the goal of which is to integrate children with Downs Syndrome and a certain range of related disabilities into the main stream of school life to the extent possible. (The program is known as an UPI - "Unité Pédagogique d'Intégration" - and is still very much in its early stages. We can make further information on this new program upon request.)

Our target is the trip to school, which in most cases requires personal accompaniment but which the UPI unit works on to see if they can increase the range of autonomy of some of the kids for this important part of their day. They do amazing things with these efforts, but we thought that a bit of technology and more active participation by the kids themselves might also lend a hand.

The idea will be to provide each child in the test unit with a specially adapted mobile phone that is 'fine tuned' to their special needs and hence made very easy for them to use. The kinds of situations that we should be anticipating include such things as when they get lost, panic for some reason, or otherwise find themselves in difficulty. Their little easy- to-use mobile will be the good friend to which they can turn for help when no one else they know is around.

This is a pilot project aimed at the pilot UPI to 'test drive" a program that could once proven be extended perhaps to other children in similar situations in the Ile de France. And why not, in time the country as a whole?

The test project should probably take place over a full semester - and it should be designed so that the system will remain in place in the test site even it proves useful there for all concerned.

Ideally the program will be accompanied by a series of little, easy to use User Logs, which each child can fill out at the beginning of each day to explain how they used it since the last time. (The phones of course have built in memory so there will also be in each phone additional information which the student of teacher can also write to the log.)

The phones will have a GPS location/navigation capability of course.

We see this as a learning process - which will allow our children to do more on their own and still have fail safe backup.

We can anticipate mixed results from such a project, but if done with care it should also be possible to soften the edges for those children who may have more difficulty in adapting.

The log should be easy for the UPI kids to fill out themselves if possible. And should certainly take no more than a couple of minutes.

Their teachers can also maintain daily logs in which they record their observations and thoughts, which over the test period should provide quite a substantial and useful base for the final analysis and evaluation.

The parents might also be invited to keep their own little daily logs (again, simplicity and minimum time to complete would be a requisite).

Someone might also create a UPI Blog in which portions of the project and the results can be posted from time to time. This could be useful for other schools and UPI units in IDF and else where in France so that they can follow the progress of the project. The blog should also allow them to post comments and ask questions.

It might also be useful to create a small control group, also with their own logs, which would also record how the other (so called normal) students use their phones over the day. Any such project should be carried out on a volunteer basis of course, and it would we think be a rewarding thing for certain children to do. Part of the process of socialization and active citizenship which is one of the main tasks of all schools.

This should be an easy project to finance and otherwise get support for. In addition to your ideas, once we have a work plan I would like to take it to my related networks to see what kind of support we might be able to get for this worthy project.