Original teaching materials with dot codes, which can be linked to multimedia such as audio, movies, web pages, html files, and PowerPoint files, were created for use with students with disabilities. Hand-crafted original teaching materials can easily be created by the users themselves—for example, by schoolteachers—with newly developed and easy-to-handle software. A maximum of four multimedia files can be linked to each Post-It sticker icon and/or dot codes overlaid with a specially-designed software (GM Authoring Tool), and such multimedia files are replayed with a specially-designed sound pen (G-Speak) and scanner pen (G-Pen Blue) with Bluetooth functionality just by using the pen to touch the Post-It sticker icon and/or the dot codes on the printed document. Many activities using dot code materials have been successfully conducted, especially at special needs schools. Basic information on the creation of these materials—and on their use in schools—is presented in this chapter.

University students go to school several times a week, as voluntary supporters, and help teachers not only conduct lessons, but also create self-made teaching materials with newly developed technologies such as multimedia-enabled dot codes and EPUB 3 eBooks with Read-Aloud. The university students-schoolteachers partnership enables the younger students to learn the required subjects with newly educational technologies. For university students, especially those in the pre-service teacher program, such a collaboration is really effective to not only know the class lessons, but also to encourage them to become teachers. The collaborative research works of the university professor with the ICT business companies are crucial to produce newly creative and gifted software and tools for students with various difficulties. This chapter briefly presents newly developed software and tools used for class lessons, and then it describes fruitful collaboration with schoolteachers in creating self-made teaching materials and conducting activities.

The teaching of programming and its basic concepts, even to students with disabilities, has a crucial influence on the development of their cognitive functions and blends class lessons with real life. This chapter describes two activities with educational robotics, performed at a school for special needs. In the activities, the students with physical disabilities could nicely operate a wheelchair without bumping into the classmates and dance with moving hands powerfully while expressing the images of the songs; those with intellectual disabilities could learn words describing directions like right, left, go, and back and clarify how many steps the robot could take to reach the destination. These two classes with education robotics provided them with joyful and skillful activities that were quite different to the daily lessons in the existing subjects, and they would benefit from the opportunity to learn additional life skills that are highly applicable to living within society.

Changes in the composition of underground ectomycorrhizal communities along a secondary successional vegetation gradient were investigated in Kashiwa City, Kanto District, eastern Japan. Soil cores were sampled from the surface soils of six plots in a successional series of vegetation, and ectomycorrhizal root tips were classified into morphotypes by macroscopic observation and measurement of the internal transcribed spacer 3–4 length of rDNA. The inoculum potential of ectomycorrhizal fungi in the soils was also investigated by germinating and growing Japanese red pine seedlings in pots. The species richness of ectomycorrhizal fungi on tree roots increased along the successional gradient from the pioneer tree stage (Pinus densiflora Sieb. et Zucc. stands) to the middle stage (deciduous Quercus serrata Thunb. and Castanea crenata Sieb. stands) and then slightly decreased in the climax stage (evergreen Quercus myrsinaefolia Bl. stands). The increase in the number of ectomycorrhizal morphotypes was strongly correlated with the increase in the biomass of ectomycorrhizal trees along the succession. Ectomycorrhizal propagule banks were found in the soil of pioneer grass- and shrublands where ectomycorrhizal trees were not present. Unlike the diversity of ectomycorrhizal morphotypes on tree roots, the morphotype richness and diversity of ectomycorrhizal inocula in the soil infective to pine seedlings increased only from the grassland to the pine successional stage and not in the deciduous and evergreen-oak stages. The composition of ectomycorrhizal communities on mature trees and ectomycorrhizal propagule banks in soils showed a successional gradient along the secondary vegetation gradient, but many common morphotypes were present among the different vegetation stages.

The teaching of programming and its basic concepts even to young children has a crucial influence on the development of their cognitive functions and blends the lessons in the class with real life. In this chapter, school activities with educational robotics performed at both the special-needs education school and general public school were described. The students with mild intellectual disabilities and physically handicapped at the special needs school could build the robots nicely using small blocks and move them as they wanted through coding. The intellectual disabled students usually do not have enough long-term memory and are weak in abstraction but could develop the ability to actually understand logical thinking through hands-on learning with educational robotics. Through the present activities, the students including the public school could become aware of various goods around them programmed with coding and connect the learning in class to the real world.