When the children of Marjorie McClure School, in Chislehurst, take part in PE lessons, teacher Guy Wilkins uses a range of ICT equipment, including a portable Hitachi interactive whiteboard, to allow children to be active score keepers, make video clips for assessing their performances and to create presentations of their work afterwards.

Guy, who won the award for Excellence in Special Needs Teaching in 2004, incorporates ICT in his lessons as a way of including all children in the PE experience - whatever their ability. Like all teachers at the school, which caters for 85 physically challenged children from 3-19 years, Guy understands the value of using ICT in special needs teaching and is committed to using it to help achieve learning objectives.

At Danecourt School in Gillingham, which has 113 primary aged children with moderate learning difficulties on the roll, head teacher John Somers uses ICT to help the children improve concentration, motivation and retention.

The school uses a range of Hitachi whiteboards, plasma screens and for the older pupils, tablet PCs, across the curriculum

At Marjorie McClure School, ICT coordinator, Laura Armitage believes ICT can help engage children because it allows a multi-sensory approach, with sound, pictures and video clips providing a variety of ways to stimulate interes

For example, a visualiser, an electronic imaging tool, is often used in science lessons to project a 3-D image of what the teacher is doing onto a whiteboard for all to see.

While both schools are convinced that ICT is the way forward in SEN teaching and learning, they are aware that it is important to use it wisely. “There’s no point in using ICT just for the sake of it and it’s very important that ICT is not just used as entertainment,” says Laura.

For more information about how Hitachi’s products can benefit your school, please contact Alex Goudge, Marketing Manager, Hitachi Interactive Solutions, Tel: +44 (0)20 7038 1030, www.hitachisoft-uk.com