Elyse Reynolds wasn’t looking for evidence of adoption for assistive technology. She was just walking down a hallway.

But there it was, Clicker, open on a student’s laptop while writing. She didn’t recognize this particular student, and she felt that small, private win. "Clicker is just embedded," she'll tell you. "It's being used."

That's what four years of district-wide adoption looks like at Lake Washington School District, a district of 32 elementary schools outside Seattle. Not a rollout metric. A moment in a hallway nobody planned, with a kid whose name you don't know, doing exactly what you hoped they'd be doing.

Elyse and her counterpart Taylor Phu are Lake Washington's two Assistive Technology Specialists. Both came up as special education teachers — something they note is unusual in the AT world. Taylor spent fifteen years in the district, working with middle schoolers through transition-age students before moving into the role. Elyse made the shift in 2017. The classroom didn't leave them when they left it. It's the lens through which they see everything, including what it takes to get a tool into the hands of the people who need it most.

When a student who refused to write produced a full paragraph

The day after a Clicker training, a para tried something different with a student who had, up to that point, refused to write in any form. This was a student who had decided, somewhere along the way, that writing wasn't something they could do. The next morning, Taylor got a photo of a full paragraph on the screen. Pictures popping up alongside the words as the student typed, the page filling in a way that must have felt, finally, like something working the way it was supposed to.

"Paras are the backbone of special education," Taylor says. They're in the room every day. They're the ones who need something they can actually use tomorrow morning, with no preparation, no time. Getting Clicker into that para's hands, and making sure she knew what to do with it, was the whole point.

One strong support across Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3

That thinking, teacher-first and relentlessly practical, starts with how Clicker fits into Lake Washington's MTSS framework. Central to that framework is a belief Taylor and Elyse always return to that a strong support shouldn't live only at Tier 2 or Tier 3. If a tool genuinely works, it should work across all three tiers.

Because all elementary students at Lake Washington have access to Clicker, Taylor and Elyse can offer it as a genuine Tier 1 support. But what makes it hold across tiers is the range it contains. One student might be typing independently with word prediction on. Another might be working through a Sentence Set, writing in whole phrases. A third might be using switch access.

Same tool, same activity, same classroom, but calibrated differently for each kid. Nobody needs to be pulled out, and nobody gets a visibly different experience. They're all simply writing. This kind of access across tiers reflects a Universal Design for Learning approach, where support is available to all students, not just those who qualify for them.

Early on, a general education teacher looked at Elyse mid-meeting and said something that stuck, "Every student needs this tool in my class."

Keeping tools top of mind with just-in-time communication

Knowing what teachers need and when they need it comes directly from having been in the classroom themselves. "Elyse and I have a little bit of a SpEd teacher's brain," Taylor says. When they send out newsletters highlighting Clicker resources, they think about when it’s most useful, like the week before spring break, or that first week back from a long weekend. They know what a just-in-time message feels like versus a well-intentioned one. The feedback they get back confirms it. Teachers write to say, "I was able to use that Clicker Set today." Taylor says the staff's response "reignites not just their knowledge of Clicker but their excitement about it."

The newsletters are structured accordingly, as well. They keep it simple at the top and include deeper resources at the bottom, packaged so a special ed teacher can forward the whole thing to a para in one click. Even the best resource won’t gain traction if friction occurs at the handoff point.

The tech tool is never the hard part. Adoption is.

The tool is almost never the hard part in technology integration and adoption. Taylor and Elyse have spent four years building human architecture, one relationship at a time. Someone must be in the room, fluent enough to translate the technology tool into whatever problem the person in front of them is trying to solve.

Supporting multilingual learners with shared scaffolds

Nowhere is that more visible than in the classrooms that have brought Taylor and Elyse back. One MLL teacher developed a weekly plan for previewing vocabulary with her students before they entered the general education classroom. Every week she'd pull the upcoming content, adapt it inside Clicker, and send it ahead so her students could arrive with the language already in hand. When her students got to the GenEd classroom and the textbook came out, they already had the necessary prior knowledge to access the content.

As Taylor describes it, "this teacher wasn't overly simplifying key vocabulary either; she would bring down the amount of text on the page." The rigor stayed, but the barrier came down.

And whenever she made materials in Clicker for one student, she'd print extra copies and leave them in the pod area for the whole grade level. Any para, any SpEd teacher, anyone who needed them could just go grab one. Something built for a single kid with individual effort has now become a practice for an entire grade. Taylor and Elyse recognized it immediately, and it's now a system they carry into every training they do. Make it once and make it available. The student you built it for isn't the only one who needs it.

That same MLL teacher used her experience with her students with staff. A native Japanese speaker, she'd put up a sentence in Japanese — no images, just text — read it aloud, and ask the room: what did I say? After silence, she'd then put up the same sentence with Clicker images alongside the text. Suddenly the room could tell it was about the life cycle of a butterfly. For a moment, everyone in that room felt what it is to be a multilingual learner still acquiring language while the classroom keeps moving forward without you.

Translating practical takeaways from trainings

Taylor and Elyse recognized it because they'd been doing a version of the same thing for years — sitting in literacy trainings, SIOP instruction, any professional development they attend, writing in the margins: how could this be done when someone isn't confident speaking? Their answer, almost every time, is Clicker. But the answer only means something because they know what question they're trying to answer.

There's a boy Taylor describes as bright, stubborn, and completely uninterested in writing. This student finally sat down when someone showed him his writing as a Clicker Book and told him he could put his name on it because he was an author. Taylor describes it as the whole point of teaching writing, "I'm not having somebody else do this for me. This gets to be my choice."

What successful technology adoption looks like across large school districts

It comes back to that moment when Elyse saw a student she didn’t know using Clicker.

It means Clicker traveled far enough from the people who introduced it that it doesn't need them anymore. It means a teacher or para made a decision, in a room Taylor and Elyse weren't in, because someone took the time to show them how to use it, and it was simple enough to get started. "It doesn't break on kids," Taylor says. And after four years, neither does the work they've built around it.

If you want to hear Taylor and Elyse walk through their specific examples, the MLL workflow, the phonics sets, and how they made the case to district leadership, watch their webinar here: