This proposal describes an experimentation in progress with a new web app, Social Books Creator (SBC), designed to permit a cooperative construction of open and accessible digital contents for learners with Special Educational Needs, in particular students with mild cognitive disability (DSM-V), attending secondary education, but it can be also a tool and a didactic methodology useful to students all. The app will be freely available on G-suite for education platform.
The SBC’s architecture supports two main features, corresponding to a download area and an upload area:
1) An online repository of high accessibility digital texts ( Social Books Cooperative Press): is a sort of online library that contains digital contents categorized by the users with tags. The contents can be filtered by topic, author, date and accessibility editorial features.
2) An online ebooks editor for the cooperative creation of open and accessible digital contents. The users have the possibility to change interface according to their cognitive style using given template, but they can also be guided with instructions or tutorials in defining a personalized format for their ebooks.
A multimedia educators’ group is in charge to coordinate the activities of our social cooperative, Archilabò, in the field of scholastic inclusion and integrated digital education. The theoretical approaches that structure SBC are based on the idea that we learn better when we learn together, fostering scaffolding and peer-tutoring. All the learning environments, both formal or informal, should take into account the inter-psychic dimension of mental activity and they should consider the importance of the medium used to learn. Different media imply the development of different knowledges and skills and each medium used to learn shapes the way in which we re-organize our way of thinking and learning.
Here you can find a brief presentation of Social Books Creator.
