“Clicker is the best alternative pencil out there!”
Erica Lovchik is a high school alternative curriculum teacher in a self-contained life skills classroom. Her students have significant physical mobility challenges which, for many of them, can make holding a pencil quite difficult. Erica was looking to improve her students’ access to learning by removing the writing barrier for them.
“Clicker is a program that offers SO much and getting authentic writing from our students just wouldn’t be possible without it!”
Prior to using Clicker, many of Erica’s students needed a boost in their writing confidence. She shared that one of the best things about Clicker is how easy it is to add in the support her students need to achieve their individual goals.
“It’s easier to see what concepts my students are understanding, and I’ve seen their confidence in writing really improve.”
Erica also shared that her students benefit from visual support, too. She uses the built-in picture library to customize Clicker resources for her students to use. Adding images to the document increases engagement with the task and using the Picturize tool can quickly add images to the writing grids to support students with their writing.
Clicker supports all of Erica’s students who have a wide range of physical difficulties. One student uses Clicker with an eye gaze device. He can participate in writing activities and experience the curriculum as his peers do.
“Clicker is the best alternative pencil out there!”
This video was recorded at Willow Dene School, where they are using Clicker extensively to help students access the curriculum and find their voice.
I am the assistant head at Talbot Specialist School, which is a secondary specialist school for cognition and learning difficulties, and I’m also head of the teaching school. We had some prior knowledge of Clicker, having owned a previous version in the past, but decided to look into the latest version.
We arranged a staff meeting where we had a consultant from Crick Software come along to do some training with us and demonstrate the latest features. Afterwards I said, “right, let’s buy it,” because it’s obviously so much easier and quicker to create grids, there are so many more online resources – and now all the staff members use it within their classroom practice.
We use Clicker a lot for our students who need support with speech and language difficulties. I’ve worked with the Speech and Language Therapists to create resources for students for their morning work and communication targets for their IEP work (Individual Educational Plan).
We’ve also used Clicker with children who are non-verbal, giving them a voice, like a communication tool. These are children who are non-verbal not because they can’t speak, but because they’re choosing not to speak. We give them Clicker and tell them that when you put a period after a sentence it will talk for you, and because of that we’ve had lots of lovely reactions, like lots of smiling, lots of hugging, lots of high-fiving. We’ve had children who are starting to speak and say simple words, gaining confidence by having given them a voice and realizing that they are having that input into the lesson. It’s given them confidence to think, “I’ll have a go now…”.
We use Clicker Books a lot because we can have it on a big smart board where the students can draw their covers on that. Using Clicker Books, our students can create something of their own, which is brilliant. Our students also use the Clicker Board mind-mapping tool, with their central character in the middle, so that they can plan and sketch out their story ideas… It’s just a lot friendlier, I think, and much more accessible for our learners.
There are other literacy tools out there, but what we found was that they’re just not suitable for some of our students. It’s also not as infantile as others can be – it feels age-appropriate for our students, and mainstream children as well. I like the fact you can make it very bespoke to the child that you’re working with. For example, with the Predictor you can tailor it to suit different children’s needs; some of our children can’t choose from a list of six or seven options – they might only need one or two. That can fit better with their individual reading and writing targets.
Although I use it a lot with children who have SEND, the good thing about Clicker is that you can use it with both children who have SEND and those who don’t. A child doesn’t have to have a disability or a need, because it’s useful and engaging for every child. I think that’s the nice thing about it, is that it’s not seen as something that only SEND children can use but all children in any setting, too.
One of the improvements I really appreciate in the latest version of Clicker is the inclusion of realistic children’s voices for the speech feedback. The students have really taken to the ‘Harry’ and ‘Rosie’ voices, and although it’s something so simple, it’s so effective. So not only can you now change the voice to something more suitable or something to suit a particular child’s preferences, but also because we have children with names that text-to-speech software typically finds difficult to say, like Rihanna, you can change the pronunciation to get it to read the child’s actual name. Particularly for children with autism, that’s had a significant effect on them wanting to use Clicker.
I also really appreciate the Document Analysis where you can see how the children have tried to fix a word or sentence. That’s really worked for us, because with the phonics that we do with them, it just makes sure that they’re actually using it, and it fits in really well with our reading programme, Lexia.
In our networking with other schools where our teachers go out with Clicker on a laptop, we’ve found that they’ve got a previous version of Clicker on one computer or laptop, and we always tell them that it’s worth paying for the upgrade, that we will come and sit with them to show how it easy it is, or we’ll invite them into Talbot to show them how easy it is. We tell them that it will make their lives so much easier, and that it will have a significant impact on any child’s literacy and engagement levels, whether they’ve got additional needs or not. Once they’ve seen it in action, they’re convinced!
I am a class teacher and head of English and Maths at Oaktree School, where we have around 98 students with special needs. I teach Key Stage 3, in which there are students with moderate to severe learning difficulties.
We have a lot of students for whom reading and writing are massive hurdles. No matter which class – from Key Stage 2 up to Sixth Form – they all struggle somehow. A big difficulty for many of them is their fine motor skills. This makes it really hard for them to make progress – they know what they want to write but they can’t as they don’t have good letter formation, for example, which seems very unfair to me. This is where IT comes in handy.
Our Headteacher was keen to start using some form of IT to help the students, so I attended a Regional Training Day with Jordan in London to learn all about Clicker. I could straight away see the possibilities and help that it would offer our students and the school decided to purchase the Site License.
I really enjoyed the Regional Training Day; when I was back at school I recreated the training day with the staff! It was a great way to teach everyone about Clicker. Jordan even sent me his script over, which was so helpful.
One of the features in Clicker that we use a lot is the Clicker Board. We use this to discuss with the students what happens in different environments of the school. For example, we will have ‘Classroom’ in the center of the board, and ask students to come up with ideas such as ‘speaking’, ‘listening’ and ‘working’. Or ‘School Hall’ with activities such as ‘eating’ and ‘P.E’. It’s a great resource for the students.
Even the teachers are using Clicker Boards for assemblies now! The staff have been very receptive to the implementation of Clicker, I’ve not had to work hard to motivate them to use it at all.
We also enjoy using the different writing support sets, for example Sentence Sets and Connect Sets. These work really well for the students; having the structure in place and having to just select the cells makes it so much easier for them to create pieces of writing.
The realistic speech feedback tool is a big hit with the students too! All of the children, including those with severe special needs, love typing words or names into Clicker to hear it be read back to them. They find it awfully entertaining! If they are having fun with literacy, that’s fantastic.
When I consider the positive impact that Clicker is having, there’s one particular student who comes to mind in my class. Tom* was a very reluctant writer when he joined our school. Before joining Oaktree, he would only read We’re Going on a Bear Hunt and he wouldn’t write at all, as he was too concerned he would make mistakes (this is a fear he picked up whilst at mainstream school). But with Clicker, being able to customize the program so much gave Tom the confidence to have a go at writing. We turn on the picture support so he knows that if no picture comes up with his text, he has made a mistake somewhere. But I do tell him that as long as I can read it, he doesn’t need to worry too much about it. When Clicker reads his work back to him and it sounds right, that gives him the confidence to keep going! It’s fantastic, Tom has gone from writing very simplistically to wanting to write lots more.
I’ve had a lot of success in my class with Clicker; instead of just writing one word, students will generate whole sentences. Some students struggle with a qwerty keyboard due to the letters being upper case – they cannot see the correspondence between upper and lower case. So, the rainbow qwerty keyboard in Clicker is a fantastic addition! The standard computer keyboard is no longer a problem and they can write whatever they want.
The best thing about Clicker, simply, is that it puts the fun back into writing, even for students who really struggle with it. It gives them such a boost in confidence!
*Name changed for privacy