The Role of Assistive Technology in the Education of Children with Special Needs: Teacher’s Perspectives

This qualitative study investigates teachers' perspective on the use of assistive technology (AT) in their daily teaching and interaction with children with special needs. Previous research has investigated this subject from many different angles but has mostly focused on the effects of AT, whereas this study wants to understand other complexities such as challenges teachers face and their perspective on the effects of AT. The study was carried out in Sweden and the data was collected from both private and public schools through interviews with teachers based on the aim to investigate the role assisitive technology plays in the education of children with special needs in Swedish schools from the perspective of the teachers. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed with thematic analysis with the knowledge from previous research in mind to increase the research focus based on previous experiences abd existing gaps. This study had several important finding. Most importantly, the teachers expressed that assistive technology encouraged and motivated the children and made it easier for the teachers to present information to the children. At the same time, the teachers expressed that too much use of AT could create an unnecessary dependency for the students, that AT has a risk of being emotionally harmful for the children, and they expressed a lack of training to use these devices properly. From this, it was concluded that there is a need for more collaboration among teachers to echange experiences and ideas and a need for creating an environment that is more conductive to testing, learning, and evaluating technology use. For the future, this will be beneficial for the children using these devices as this will allow us to enhance our knowledge on the subject and improve the experience of the chidren while using these devices in their education