MEETING THE NEEDS OF CHRONICALLY ILL STUDENTS WITH BLENDED LEARNING

Children with chronic conditions are getting more and more attention in schools thanks to the drift towards inclusiveness. Their illnesses usually come unexpectedly and, beyond the emotional impact and physical distress both for the student and his/her family, they pose an extremely difficult problem for teachers. Some do not even come to school on a regular basis. Children with chronic conditions are getting more and more attention in schools thanks to the drift towards inclusiveness. In Spain, chronically ill students are often provided with at-home teacher assistance for a given number of hours every week, during which they review the basic curriculum for their age and are given tasks to be corrected in later lessons. However, due to their precarious health, in many of those occasions the students are either in bed or too weak to make any protracted work.
The authors defend that blended learning may meet many of the needs of chronically ill students for a wide range of reasons, outstanding among which are the following: it provides detailed and immediate feedback, that it is location and time independent, and that it can be customized to fit the child’s needs. A case in point is reported, giving details of how the LMS was structured, how the ill students responded to the platform and some feedback from their families. All in all, we consider that the results are very encouraging and hope to extend our proposal to further schools in a near future.