Once upon a time, at BETT, if you wanted to find out about some special needs products or check out the latest offerings from the likes of Widgit, Crick, Resource or Traxsys you would just head for the Special Needs Village. None of these companies are in the Village this year. In fact, there has been considerable tension and bad feeling among exhibitors – but more of that later. However, you will find Dolphin (SN50) showing Dolphin Tutor, a toolbar with a set of facilities to support pupils who have reading difficulties. The toolbar sits on top of Word, Excel and Internet Explorer and lets the user change the spacing between lines, the font and colours. It has a predictive facility which will speed up text input, or you can scan in documents and let the program convert them into text.
It will read them aloud, highlighting the words to help pupils to link sound and the written form. It also lets you save all your on-screen text as an audio file. This means that pupils will be able to revise the content of a subject, instead of trying to decode and get meaning from notes they wrote months ago. What a great idea!
Rite Of Passage.
Another product well worth a look is English through Driving Theory. Nowadays, studying for the theory test is almost a rite of passage for many young people. CTAD (SN36) have joined forces with Thomas Danby College in Leeds to produce a pack for would-be drivers who are learning English as an Additional Language or who have problems with written assessments. This is going to motivate many reluctant learners and I think it is one well worth considering in Pupil Referral Units and as part of out-of-school education, as well as in the classroom. There are quizzes to test learning styles, driving skills checklists, and paper-based and computer-based activities, including links to driving related websites.
Other stands to check out include: Claro software (SN18) which specialises in cost effective solutions for learners with a visual impairment, the British Dyslexia Association (SN4), The Dyslexia Institute (SN24), and Lucid Research (SN60), which has produced dyslexia assessment tools, as well as old favourites TextHelp (SN40) and KeyTools (SN10). But overall, the pickings are thin this year because the Village has moved and many of the stalwarts have voted with their feet. For a long time, the Village has stood between the two halls and many people have stopped to browse as they moved from the major companies to the DfES and Becta stands. However, the organisers say this has caused a bottleneck and cited ‘health and safety’ as one reason for the move. The Village is now right at the very back and, while organisers claim there is room for growth, some companies are not convinced. They feel that the new location is too out of the way to attract business.