I’ve been teaching with Clicker at Forehill Primary School for 8 years. My role includes assessing for and identifying dyslexic pupils; I offer support, advice, and strategies to staff, pupils and parents. We use Clicker to give dyslexic learners, pupils with ASN and pupils with literacy challenges more support because I recognised Clicker’s huge potential for helping these learners to progress. I train pupils with Clicker so they can use it independently in class and at home as needed and we use Clicker when we run targeted writing support groups for pupils.
Clicker was a game changer for these learners, its support tools and accessibility at home for homework has encouraged independence for pupils, built their confidence in their writing ability and allowed them to achieve where they struggled before. In lessons, pupils can follow the class plans for writing, but staff can use Clicker to create plans, word banks and text for individuals to use in class or as part of a targeted support group. Thanks to Clicker, these children access the intended learning for the class, but with the right support for their learning needs.
Before using Clicker, children would attempt to make plans on paper, and sometimes their writing would be illegible, or they would lose track of their ideas as they couldn’t make sense of what they had written. However, with Clicker, the children now enjoy planning their work on mind maps using Clicker Board and colouring the background and cells to mark different categories of words for their word banks. My favourite thing about the children using Clicker, is the instant access they have to hearing their work read back to them with the speech feedback tool. It lets pupils know what they have actually written, which helps them recognise any sentence or word errors. They also love it because they can select the Scottish voice for speech feedback so it sounds even more familiar to them.
Clicker has been a great support over the years for autistic learners – we had one particular child who was so motivated by using Clicker that he would come to his writing sessions early to check that the computers were turned on and ready to use! This year, Clicker has helped some of our ASN pupils go from being unable to write independently to being able to use sentence sets to complete writing tasks, and others are now writing sentences, and some paragraphs, independently. I’ve even seen successes where these children have then transferred these skills to handwritten literacy tasks!
I asked one of my groups, P5, for some feedback on Clicker. They chose to create a Clicker Board! This is what they said:
Clicker has increased the confidence and general mood of the children who use it for writing - it’s fun and it takes the pressure off for many of them. It’s fantastic!