Providing Opportunities for ALL Learners to Access Writing Through Technology
A guest blog post by
Megan Brown, Literacy & Communication Lead / KS4 SEN teacher
CALL Scotland Course Review
Technology to Support Reading & Writing for Learners with Complex Needs
Week 2: Assistive Technologies to Support Writing
My name is Megan and I have been a teacher for 9 years, 5 of which have been teaching in SEN. I currently split my week between being the Literacy and Communication Lead and a KS4 teacher in a SEN School in West Berkshire. Our pupils are aged between 3-18 and have a range of additional needs including ASD, SLD and PMLD. Over the last year, I have been on a mission to update our Literacy provision across the whole school, aiming to make it more accessible to all and have been inspired by discovering Teach Us Too and their vision. I have learnt so much and am enjoying passing this onto our staff and in turn seeing the progress our pupils are making.
This week’s session has been on how to use Assistive Technologies to support writing. We had the opportunity to explore the Book Creator software in order to both support with engaging pupils and helping to make writing more accessible.
Book Creator is free and available to all teachers and can be accessed via a desktop or Ipad. A teacher can set up pupil accounts that can then be accessed via a link. The free account allows you to have up to 40 books in your library and there is a paid version that allows for storage of up to 1000 books in your library as well as a wider range of templates available. However, from what we were shown, I think other than the storage space, the free version offers a great variety of features and templates to explore.
The app has lots of accessible features on including dictation, auto draw (just start drawing and the system will try and guess what you’re drawing and give options for you to select), insert audio (complete with a helpful countdown), teacher feedback (where you can add comments including through the form of audio or video), dictation with up to 120 languages, add images, alt text, and read to me which reads aloud the whole book for you.
My thoughts of Book Creator were that it is an engaging and motivating tool that will support our pupils with accessing writing and sharing their ideas through a variety of way. I love the idea of the templates that set up the book ready for the pupil to populate with their thoughts and create a book without being overwhelmed by a blank page. I’m really excited to start using it with my class as they love sharing their ideas but struggle with typing so the dictation and audio options will be great for them. I also really love the ease that it appears to be to share their books, both supporting with home/school communication and allowing pupils books to be shared across the school. It could be a nice way for our pupils to share their experiences or thoughts at events like annual reviews and parents evenings too! Lastly, the different types of templates as well look like it’s an app that will help support writing across the school for a variety of different age rangers too.
We also explored the program Clicker and some of its features. Clicker has been around for a while and updates regularly with new features. It is something that we use at my school currently but are still learning about the full capabilities and as a result I don’t feel we use it as effectively as we could. Clicker is available on a range of devices and is effectively a simplified word processor that has lots of different layers of support. There are learning grids that you can access straight away and start using which are a great starting point. As mentioned, there are lots of different ways you can use Clicker, from matching sets, to typing with predictive word capability on. You can have it set with either pictures or symbols to appear as you type and it will read the words and then sentence as you write with its text to speech option.
In my experience, I have found Clicker to be really useful, however I do feel the better understanding you have of Clicker, the better you are at choosing the right settings to use to support each individual pupil. This is something I am currently exploring to really understand all the different elements available and the website is really useful with lots of great webinars on how to navigate the program.
It was really useful to hear from Craig how some of the different features work from incorporating the use of a switch or joystick. He was able to show us how to use the access options to model how you can use the program when attaching a joystick or switch for pupils to use. This is not something that I have tried before and am eager try out as it makes Clicker more accessible to more pupils. This is something that is so easy to set up and opens up the world of writing to so many more pupils. It is definitely something that I will be taking away with me to explore further.
We also had the opportunity to briefly explore Grid 3. It’s an AAC software that we currently use to support a few of our pupils across the school but they are currently expanding their capabilities to include more opportunities for pupils including through the use of writing grids that are similar to Clicker. The link between the resources and the Book Bug books available in Scotland was really great to see and explore further as well as the templates to build your own resources. As mentioned, our school currently use it to support some of our AAC users but have yet to explore the other capabilities of it.
Towards the end of the course we had the chance to briefly look at Jane Farrell’s Predictiable Chart Writing and also Google Jamboard. Predictive Chart writing is a method that I have started exploring since coming across it in a previous Teach us too course and have found it really useful with my class. It has really supported them with forming their ideas into sentences using the structure and then developing this throughout the week, they have particularly enjoyed making their books at the end!
In conclusion, I think that this week’s course has been really beneficial in giving me more ideas to take away and explore further to then support pupils across my school with accessing writing more. I have one boy in my class who loves making books and is so eager to write and we have been using some of the recording capabilities from Clicker up until this point but I am really excited to give him the opportunity to explore Book creator and see where his imagination takes him! There are so many great resources and programs out there that are easy to use and I think now is about spreading the awareness of these in order to give all our pupils the opportunities that they deserve. I am looking forward to what the rest of the course brings to then see the impact and opportunities that this will bring for my pupils.