A good piece on research on tablets in special education with as most important insight… there isn’t that much known yet:

“To understand just how limited these studies are, keep this in mind: 6.4 million students in the U.S., aged 3-21, have some kind of learning disability. That’s about 13 percent of all public school students. Yet most of the papers now being published look at fewer than ten students. One “surveyed” a dozen special education teachers. This small sample size matters because special education students vary so widely in their needs and abilities. There is no typical or representative learning disabled student.

The other takeaway, as I said, from looking over these studies is that the advantage found from using the iPad was often small or mixed. It’s hard to talk about statistical significance when the sample size is in single digits. One study of just five elementary school students compared the use of an iPad communication app to a simpler, less expensive system using picture cards. Some students did better with the iPad. For others there was no detectable difference.”