Providing adaptations for Special Education Mobile Learning

The development of mobile technologies is opening new possibilities in the field of education, specifically when it involves people with special educational needs (SEN). Mobility gives freedom to carry out learning activities at any moment or place. However, given the variety in SEN, it is difficult to create educational contents that fit for everybody. Rather, it seems appropriate to incorporate adaptation mechanisms that take into account the user profile, context or progress to modify the learning activities and adjust interaction, contents or presentation to the user’s needs. In this paper, an abstract architecture is presented to guide in the construction of mobile applications for SEN. It comprises five models: activities, user, evaluation, cooperation and authoring, with different adaptable features. To illustrate the proposal, the architecture has been implemented in two learning tools, Picaa and Sigueme, which have been successfully used by children with special needs.