Recently we collected a wonderful success story from a collaboration between the Pupil & School Support service at Birmingham City Council and Montgomery Primary School. A project was set up to assess the impact of Clicker with a group of reluctant writers, with fantastic results!
Here is what the Pupil and School Support service had to say:
An element of the Pupil and School Support role is to work with schools to evaluate the impact technology can have to help pupils make progress. Montgomery Primary School had Clicker and were keen to utilise it to its best advantage. Year 4 were chosen as the focus group as they had a cohort of SEND learners who were finding challenge with writing activities. We specifically wanted to evaluate the impact Clicker had on the pupils’ progress against the Birmingham SEN Toolkit Writing Bands.
The Birmingham SEN Toolkits (Pupil & School Support – Access to Education (birmingham.gov.uk) help schools in identifying specific levels of need and ability for pupils within literacy and maths. The resource breaks down areas of reading, writing, speaking and listening into discrete skills on a continuum that enables schools to set appropriate and aspirational targets, identify relevant provision and to track progress as students move through the bands within each toolkit.
A small group of pupils were identified that would benefit most from the project. They were a group of boys who were reluctant writers and their toolkit data showed that they needed additional targeted support to progress their writing. They needed support to compose simple sentences to express their ideas and in addition, further support with their spelling skills. They were finding challenge in combining all the skills needed to translate their ideas onto paper and as a result of this were becoming reluctant writers.
Clicker was introduced to work on their toolkit targets, with regular monitoring using the toolkits to see what progress they had made.
The children really enjoyed using Clicker, they found that they could write more, and that the Picturize function gave them valuable picture support when writing. Their teacher introduced Clicker’s Word Banks, which would support whatever topic they were writing about, and it was a real success. The children could print off their work and put it in their workbooks so week on week they could see what they were producing. It was really motivating, and it really boosted their self-esteem!
The children went from not writing, or hardly writing at all, to producing full pieces of work! The children loved it and based on the toolkit data they all made good progress, particularly in relation to their previous rates of progress. Typically, you would aim for two to three bands of progress a year, but some of the group had already achieved that in the second term of using Clicker! Seeing such good results so quickly with Clicker was very positive.
We found that Clicker was easy for the children to use once it had been modelled and demonstrated. Visually it’s very uncomplicated, which is important for children with SEND. We like that Clicker is visually appealing for our learners, and that there are lots of LearningGrids resources already prepared for the different areas of the curriculum – which really helps the teachers, too.
The project was a real win for the children involved because they had previously disengaged with writing, and now we could see that their whole attitude to writing had improved and changed with the use of Clicker. They began to see themselves as writers.
