48 • Lack of distractions: During online learning students may benefit from fewer distractions by peers or by noise in the classrooms and it may be easier to control and manipulate distractions in the home. • Better meaningful social contact: some students have been show to benefit from online social interactions which are often perceived as being less threatening • Students with disabilities themselves are motivated and perceive that they can learn online (Harvey et al., 2014) In Finland best practices show that very simple top tips, made for online teaching for pupils with special needs, can be useful to help all teachers and parents to fully access online teaching materials and lessons. Top tips like checklists of tools, providing clear rules, asking personal questions of the learning experience, allowing regular breaks, sharing lesson plans with the parents, etc. can brake barriers and facilitating factors (Guidance for the inclusion, 2022). Implementing such activities or using appropriate tools and methods online requires specific pedagogical, content- and technological knowledge and skills. Due to the lack of experience with online pedagogy and digital educational material and tools, teachers struggled and still are unable to shift their daily teaching practices into online or blended mode to meet the complexities of remote teaching (Nisiforou et al., 2021; Junsay et al., 2021; Sofianidis et al., 2021 & Katić et al., 2021). The difficulty of adapting the material & applying an online pedagogy resulted in lack of interaction in distance education. This was another challenge that affected students’ well-being and their socio-emotional needs, as research reports for the case of many EU countries, such as Cyprus, Italy and Slovenia (Nisiforou et al., 2021; OECD, 2020 & Katić et al., 2021). Students seem to find it hard to concentrate online, even interact or collaborate with their teachers and classmates. Especially in science, which is a content – oriented subject, this lack of interaction and collaboration among students can be a serious barrier, as it demotivates learning and increases boredom (Junsay et al., 2021; Sofianidis et al., 2021; Rannastu-Avalos et al., 2020). A study investigating secondary education students’ experiences on the distance education period that followed schools’ closure due to the pandemic in Cyprus shows that the lack of visual contact of students with classmates and teachers or the inability to participate in out-of-the classroom activities resulted in feelings of isolation, disconnection and boredom. This is not only the case in Cyprus. Studies conducted in other countries during the pandemic have also indicated significant increases in students’ emotional/psychological distress and a decline in their wellbeing during school closure. Students did not find remote learning a satisfactory learning experience. It seriously affected their engagement, productivity and performance. Such losses were greater in Mathematics than in reading (Sofianidis et al., 2021 &
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