Helping students with a chronic illness connect to their teachers and school

Many Australian students miss extended periods of schooling as a result of an illness and the subsequent time spent in hospital and convalescing. Such extended absence inevitably disrupts the academic work of these students, as well as presenting them with an array of social challenges. In an ARC funded project researchers are investigating ways of connecting such students with their school and their studies through the use of digital technologies.
Over a three year period the researchers will have worked with more than 25 school-age students from Years 1 to 12. The students all have a chronic illness that is interrupting their education, and have been referred to the research project through the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne (RCH). A team that comprises teachers from the student’s school, teacher consultants from the RCH Education Institute (RCH-EI), and researchers have worked together to develop, implement and evaluate communications strategies, support structures and continuing professional development programs with the overall aim of providing students with effective learning through computer-mediated communication. Within the context of maintaining academic engagement with school for a group of students who are unable to attend school for prolonged periods, the project is investigating the effectiveness of a variety of different technologies including notebook computers, netbook computers, video conferencing, chat and online learning.
In this presentation we will report on some of the difficulties that classroom teachers are asked to confront when one of their students is absent for an extended period of time as a consequence of chronic illness. So far in the project very few of these teachers have been IT specialists, although in 2009 it is expected that every classroom teacher has some technological competencies relevant to the level and nature of what they teach. RCH-EI teacher consultants and the researchers have endeavoured to utilise web-based video-conferencing. At a superficial level this would appear to be perfectly simple, an approach that could easily connect student (whether at home or in hospital), teacher, teacher consultant and researcher. In practice each of these stakeholders is faced with a range of technical and pedagogic challenges. These issues will be identified and discussed in this presentation.

Files: 

Corrected final version(257.85 KB)

This is how you cite this paper: