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Based on the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), Clicker provides flexible literacy support that ensures all your students can engage in learning opportunities in a meaningful and challenging way. And with the pandemic widening the achievement gap more than ever, there’s never been a better time to provide UDL options in our schools.
In our recent webinar, What will teaching and learning look like for diverse learners on the other side of the pandemic?, assistive technology specialist Rose Racicot explored what the pandemic has taught us about UDL, communication and inclusivity, and what learning will look like for diverse learners in a post-pandemic world.
What is Universal Design for Learning?
UDL is a research-based framework that allows educators to meet the needs of every student within a classroom setting.
According to Understood’s Universal Design for Learning: A teacher’s guide, UDL works on the principles that “barriers to learning are in the design of the setting, not in the student”, and provides a framework to reduce these barriers.
With UDL, learners will not always do the same task, in the same way, or at the same time. Instead, students access flexible options depending on their specific strengths, skills and needs.
Based on the key principles of engagement, representation and expression, UDL ensures that:
- All students are engaged and understand the objectives
- Information is available in a way that reaches all learners
- All students have flexible options to demonstrate their understanding
How does Clicker provide this universal support?
In our webinar, Rose described how the pandemic has highlighted a need for inclusive and accessible technology within our classrooms. Assistive technology software like Clicker and DocsPlus can provide UDL options for engagement, representation and expression.
A tool like Clicker offers a wide range of features that support pupils to more fully engage with the curriculum. Accessibility features that may be necessary for some students are useful for all students.
“A student with a visual impairment can listen to the content or have enlarged text,” explains Rose. “Other students may need more pictures and multimedia within the text. Some children may benefit from interacting with the text, over and over, and in their own time.”
“If a student needs to speak or dictate their ideas, they have Voice Notes or can record in Talk Sets. If a student needs word prediction, it is right there. If a writer needs greater scaffolding, there are word banks, writing frames and sentence building activities. If a child needs to easily access information in their own time, they can use Clicker Books with picture and speech support.”
Each child has unique learning needs, but with Clicker, they can all be catered for with one inclusive and universal learning tool.
How does Clicker and UDL help diverse learners?
Every single student is diverse in their learning needs, and everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. Whether it is students with different language abilities, English language learners, or students with writing anxieties which make it more difficult to cope at school, it’s vital that we find solutions that help all our diverse learners succeed.
Accessible resources based on universal design provide faster and easier access to the curriculum by all students. They provide educators with tools to differentiate lessons and offer choices for representation and expression to reach all their diverse learners.
“If accessible resources are readily available to every student in the classroom”, Rose describes, “usage goes up and the stigma goes down for those using specialised technology.”
Clicker success stories: UDL in action
Over the years, Crick has received lots of encouraging feedback from Clicker users in both mainstream and special schools. Time and again, teachers talk of how Clicker has helped not only to support struggling writers, but all their students, in various ways.
The beauty of a UDL-based tool is that all pupils can benefit, regardless of ability, knowledge or learning style. Micklehurst All Saints Primary School experienced this first-hand when they upgraded to a Clicker 8 site license last year:
“When we first began to use Clicker, we only used it with children who had barriers to writing”, explains the school’s SENDCo, Emma Gordon. “But we discovered that even children who didn’t have barriers to their learning were eager to use it themselves. It’s created a real sense of inclusion across the school. With Clicker, the children can word process and at the same time add pictures – it’s really inspiring them to do their best work.
“We now use the writing grids in virtually all our lessons; either searching for the pre-made resources on LearningGrids or creating our own. For every literacy topic I teach, I’ll insert the text from the book into a Word Bank or Connect Set (depending on the ability of the children) so that we have it ready to use.”
Clicker’s UDL design is also perfect for supporting children with dyslexia within a classroom setting. Wallacestone Primary — a large school with 500 pupils and 17 classes — have been using Clicker for precisely this reason. As Principal Teacher Sheila Robertson describes:
“We found that more children are being identified with dyslexia in school and we wanted to use Clicker in the class settings so that these children are able to access all parts of the curriculum. I have been working alongside a teacher who has been using Clicker with a whole class and it’s absolutely amazing to see how it’s working for them. We’ve now embedded Clicker across the school, and we’re also using Clicker on 30 of our iPads.”
Watch the full webinar
You can watch a recording of the full webinar here. We have also put together a short guide here too on the discussion points: https://www.cricksoft.com/us/what-will-teaching-and-learning-look-like.
If you have any questions about Clicker or would like to learn more about how Clicker can support your diverse learners, get in touch at info@cricksoft.com, or call us on 01604 671691.