We recently received a wonderful Clicker success story from Pete Thomson who is the Student Services Officer at Magill School.
Pete has been using Clicker for over a decade and is a huge advocate of the support it provides pupils and the progress they make.
Magill use Clicker across the school to support a range of learners. Pete has shared with us the wonderful results he has seen recently by using Clicker with a non-verbal student and a pupil who had a negative relationship with writing.
In the first success that Pete shared with us, he used Clicker to help his non-verbal student to access the curriculum.
“James* has Clicker on his computer which he controls through Clicker’s touchscreen compatibility. By using the software, he accesses similar learning as his peers, but in a way that is best suited to his learning needs.
I created word banks to scaffold James’ writing that included key words. Using Clicker’s speech feedback, we would right-click so that James could hear each word and then make his choice.
The results were amazing! James successfully wrote an information report and he was very proud of his work! It’s safe to say that Clicker enabled James to participate in a project that closely matched the learning intention of his peers - whereas, without Clicker, he would have struggled to access this writing task at all.”
Pete used Clicker’s word banks to help his reluctant writer, too – but found that they boosted her writing confidence in a way that handwritten work alone struggled to achieve.
“Molly* was brought to my attention by her teacher who knew that Clicker was a must-try to see if it would improve her engagement and attitude to writing.
I decided to make some writing word banks for her with some sentence openers, adjective and verb suggestions etc. Instantly with minimal scaffolding, Molly wrote a sentence for the word ‘jet’. The sentence was, ‘I flew in an aeroplane jet.’ It was great to see that she was successfully using her word banks!”
Over time, Pete saw a huge change in Molly’s attitude to writing as she confidently and enthusiastically engaged with sentence writing on Clicker.
“When I next saw Molly, she began her sentence with, ‘The boy’. I asked her if she could add a bit more about the boy, and her response was, ‘You mean an adjective?’… I was totally blown away! Using the word banks she wrote, ‘The fast and clever boy played in the beach.’
It was incredible to see how Molly’s negative relationship with writing had changed, and how she was now happily writing and editing her sentences independently with Clicker.
There’s no doubt that Clicker has transformed the writing experience and outcomes for these students – it’s brilliant and I love using it!”
To read the full story, click here.
*Names changed for privacy purposes
