Shigeru Ikuta is a Senior Scholar (Special Researcher) at Institute of Human Culture Studies, Otsuma Women's University, Japan. He is Emeritus Professors of Tokyo Metropolitan University and Otsuma Women's University. He is awarded with 2011 SITE Outstanding Poster Award and 2020 SITE Outstanding Paper Award. He is an education technologist, teacher educator in science, and special educator with a focus on student learning and development based on communication aids. He completed his graduate work and earned a doctorate in science at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. He had been working as a Professor of Computation Chemistry at Tokyo Metropolitan University for twenty-nine years. He moved to University of Tsukuba and has started collaborative works with schoolteachers, affiliated with the University. He has been creating original handmade teaching materials with dot codes, eBooks with Media Overlays, and Augmented Reality in supporting the students' learning.
He (now in collaboration with Professor Kiyoji Koreeda, Toyo University) has been involved in organizing a worldwide collaborative learning community with more than 250 schoolteachers both at the schools for special needs and the ordinary public schools, to develop original self-made teaching materials using the newly developed information and communication technology (ICT), and has conducted school activities with the schoolteachers, in partnership with the Japanese company Gridmark Inc. Ikuta has provided the schoolteachers with necessary software and tools, developed by Gridmark Inc. and himself, to create their original self-made teaching materials and their know-hows for free. Now, schoolteachers and researchers not only from Japan but also from the USA, China, Egypt, Korea, United Arab Emirates and Oman also join his community.