There is an increasing amount of material on the Internet that teachers dealing with special needs students may find useful, especially ICT related. Sometimes it is a case of you don’t know what you don’t know!

Having been seconded to the Northern Grid for Learning (http://www.northerngrid.org) in the summer of 1999 from my school (Abbey Hill School Technology College http://www.abbeyhill.stockton.sch.uk) my brief was to develop SEN (Special Educational Needs) resources. With this in mind I started to develop a CD ROM of as many free resources and documents I could find that related to aspects of special needs. This was a big task and the project grew very fast. In January 2002 The CD was produced which was stuffed with free resources and documents related to a variety of SEN areas and included quite a number of free software resources, many unfamiliar to many teachers.

This CD ROM has been a great success and was given away to any one who wanted a copy. It was very well received and has gone to many countries outside the UK, New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, Costa Rica and many European countries.

The simple way to produce the CD was to make all the resources free this convinced people that there was no profit motive for the resources and did help me to gather as much as possible from potential contributors. One big problem I had was convincing classroom teachers that their own resources were of good quality and that they should be include on the CD. Everyone is a winner as each contributor sees their work placed alongside all the other material and both individuals and institutions benefit from the process.

Well what next? I have been approached by the Northern Grid team to look at producing a second CD ROM based on the first version with I hope the inclusion of many more useful resources. This is where you can take part in the project and see your materials included. So what is required you may ask? The following list may give a flavour of what the CD is intended to include.