Port Washington-Saukville School District recently took part in a 90-day Clicker pilot to determine if the software could meet the diverse needs of their students.

The pilot was such a success that the district is planning on expanding usage across their schools.

Occupational Therapist, Laura Futterer, recently caught up with our team to discuss the district’s experience with Clicker.

Expanding access to the curriculum

One of the main goals of the pilot was to enable students in special education to access the curriculum.

“A big part of school is reading and writing, and there are a group of students who do struggle with that. My goal was to expand their access and be able to modify and shift the curriculum as necessary so that they could participate more in reading and writing. Clicker was a great way to be able to do that.”

Writing support that works across grades and schools

The district is made up of three elementary schools, a middle school, and a high school. This meant that the population that would be using Clicker would span from Kindergarten to Grade 12.

“We wanted to get a really big sample of the students just to see what the different levels could do. We have some students who started with just being able to identify letters, students who are writing simple paragraphs, and everywhere in between.”

[…] Clicker is a huge game changer because you can simplify it for a first-grade student, or you can go up to the middle or high school levels, where we were using Word Banks, word prediction, and the text-to-speech in the Clicker Document, and it looked more like a typical writing program that other students would use.”

A stand-out student transformation

One particularly powerful transformation that Laura witnessed was with a first-grade student who is diagnosed with Down Syndrome.

Before using Clicker, he was working on tracing letters. He knew some letters and would sometimes attempt to write his own name, but he simply didn't have the motor control to form letters by hand.

Student’s attempt at tracing writing examples before Clicker

Once he was introduced to Clicker, he was able to show staff how well he really understood lesson content.

Clicker Books enabled him to access reading activities, and staff could quickly adjust the difficulty of matching Sentence Sets to offer the right level of challenge for him. Picture and auditory support also made a big difference in his ability to write. With these tools in place, he was able to complete a reading comprehension activity alongside his peers.

“He was able to use the picture support and the auditory support to write a story and answer questions after the story that he read. He did ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider’, and he was able to sequence the story with support tools. He had a nice paragraph written by the time he was done.”

Student’s writing exercise with Clicker

Unlocking student potential district-wide

Clicker helped staff see more clearly what their students were capable of and gave some students their first chance to demonstrate their knowledge without barriers.

The student below, for example, clearly understood the prompt in a writing task they were given before using Clicker, and had ideas they wanted to share in response to it.

Student’s work before Clicker

Once they started using Clicker, handwriting was no longer a barrier for them, and as a result, they were able to transfer their ideas from brain to page so that their teachers could assess their work.

Student’s writing during the Clicker trial

Student’s writing at the end of the Clicker trial

In the case of the student below, staff would have found it hard to tell if they understood lesson content based on the writing they were producing before Clicker, but with the right support in place, they showed that they had plenty to say.

Student’s pre-Clicker writing

Student’s writing with Clicker

Another student was able to go from taking multiple weeks to create a writing piece to completing his work in a single day.

Overall, Clicker allowed many students to finally see themselves as writers.

“I can see the huge growth in the students, and they take pride in their work, and they just love being able to share what they know in a way that they can when even their verbal abilities or their handwriting abilities don't allow that.”

Embedding Clicker for the future

The district will be launching Clicker fully in the coming school year. To prepare, the original Clicker champions have been undergoing the process of introducing it to more staff, who had immediate buy-in once they saw its potential.

“People get excited when you show them how the students can use it and when they start seeing that success. There is nothing better than student success, and Clicker allows that to happen.”

If you’d like to learn more about how Clicker can expand access to the curriculum at your school or district, you can schedule a free discovery call to talk to one of our experts.