All posts by badminton

Real Training recognises the most special school

awards, special needs, training,

There is some amazing work done in special schools and yesterday I met many teachers from schools shortlisted for the TES Award for Outstanding Special Needs School of the Year.

The finalists were:
The Bridge School, Telford, Shropshire
Frank Wise School, Banbury, Oxfordshire
James Brindley School, Birmingham
Newman School, Rotherham
The New School Butterstone, Dunkeld, Perthshire
The New School at West Heath, Sevenoaks, Kent

Pupil from Newman School shows Lorraine Petersen and Sal a magic trick

This award was sponsored by Real Training which specialises in online training courses such as the National Award for SEN co-ordination, an essential qualification for Sencos and the Certificate of Competence in Education Testing which means schools can use in-house expertise to assess children.

The ceremony took place at Park Lane Hilton with comedian and impressionist Rory Bremner as host. I was sitting with Lorraine Petersen, CEO of nasen the professional body for special needs staff. One young man from Newman School in Rotherham is a member of the magic circle and entertained us between main course and pudding with card tricks.

Mark Turner far right with winning school

The winning school was New School at West Heath in Sevenoaks, an independent school with a therapeutic unit which specialises in treating children who are severely traumatised. The school’s motto is “Rebuilding damaged lives” and they work with children from all over the country who have been abused or neglected.

At the end of the ceremony Lorraine Petersen turned to me and said, “Every day the government criticises schools and says the standards are not high enough. Events like this prove just how wrong they are.”

Mark Turner, Managing Director of Real Training, was delighted with the awards. He said, “I am so proud that Real Training can sponsor an award like this. Today, we have seen so many positive examples of excellent work in special schools which turns children’s lives around.”

Leicester Lions and Eye Gaze help Teresa to communicate

disability, New technologies, special needs,
tobii eye gaze in action
tobii eye gaze in action

2011 is The National Year of Communication which highlights the importance of good communication skills for children and young people. Some of those children need help from technology if they are to have a voice.

Last week, I was invited by Northgate Managed Services to an event called “Engage, Evolve, Excel”. It had Professor Stephen Heppell as the keynote speaker and was an ICT showcase for the great work done in Leicester schools.

There I met Teresa, a year 11 pupil from Ash Field, a day and weekly boarding special school.  She demonstrated a Tobii Eye Gaze system that lets users with severe physical disabilities control their computer just by using their eye movements.

Her school had bought the system but the camera was provided by Leicester Lions Speedway.  Teresa uses Eye Gaze to access her communication device which enables her to speak. The school invited some Leicester Lions into assembly and Teresa used her Eye Gaze to deliver her presentation thanking them for their fundraising efforts.

What a difference a bit of kit can make!

GOSH gets a SKOOG

disability, New technologies, special needs
Tom Griffiths, Peter Pan and a Skoog

Bring together experts in physics, acoustics, computing and psychology and what do you get? A Skoog! and now Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) has one. So what is a Skoog?  It’s a musical instrument disguised as a soft squishy cube which plugs into your computer. It has been programmed to respond to the lightest touch and allows children and adults to play a wide range of instruments without all the slog of practising chords and scales.

With support from Edinburgh University and NESTA (The National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts) David Skulina and Ben Schogler set out to make a totally inclusive instrument which could open up the world of music making to young people with learning difficulties, sensory impairments, behavioural issues and autism. It is especially useful for those e with conditions which have affected their manual dexterity. So often if you cannot hold an instrument or control your breathing or fine motor movements, you are destined to spend your life as a listener instead of a performer.

Tom Griffiths, who works with assistive technology at the Hospital for Sick Children won a Skoog in a prize draw held at the BETT exhibition in January, “We are delighted to have a Skoog at GOSH and are sure it will be an invaluable tool in our assessments”, said Tom. “We envisage it providing a lot of fun for our children and young people – and probably the staff, too!”

The Skoog has been extensively trialled with children who have made many recommendations about colours, the design and what they want it to do. It can easily be customised for the needs of even the most disabled child and after just a few minutes staff report an increase in confidence, skill and dexterity.  It looks like it might be party time for some of the Great Ormond Street children.

http://www.skoogmusic.com/

nasen Awards 2011 – Celebrating Inclusive Practice

disability, New technologies, special needs, , ,

I am heading north this week to cover the nasen awards for Special Children magazine. Four products have been shortlisted for the ICT Resource to support Teaching and Learning Award.
2011 is the National Year of Communication so fittingly 3 entries support speaking and listening skills:

Recordable bar from TTS
Short listed entry Recordable Bar

Recordable Bar/Story Sequencer from TTS Group can be used to create talking stories, class timetables or question and answer games
Sound Shuffle from TTS Group was created by Carol Allen, advisory teacher for ICT and special needs in North Tyneside. It is a brand new device for creating stories, sequencing and sound effects.
Logan Proxtalkerwas created by Glen Dobbs for Logan Technologies. It is a moveable picture communication device originally devised for children with autism
MyZone from Inclusive Technology Limited provides a simple desktop and a wealth of activities for people with dis aor ldd who need to access a computer via speech and pictures rather than text

The winners will be announced at a special ceremony at the Reebok Stadoium in Bolton as part of Special Needs North.

Don’t you just love technology?

Literacy, software,

I do -when it goes right. I know there are those times when we curse it as we sit and watch the timer going on forever and nothing loads.  But on a good day it does nice things.

I used to use Scraps in an old version of MS Office. If you had a piece of ext you would be using again and again to send to different people you could just highlight it and drag it onto your desktop then when you needed it you could drag it into an email or whatever.  I was quite sad when this facility disappeared from later versions of Office but this morning I realised that Notes in Outlook does the same sort of thing.

easy to re-use text
Tired of typing text over and over again?

1 Grab some text from a document. Either highlight and drag it onto the Notes icon in the Outlook sidebar or copy and paste if that is easier.
2 When you want to use that text in an email,  just drag the note icon onto the mail icon, hold and wait.  The email will open with the text in the body of the message.

Local Authorities challenge the government

BSF, disability, Politics, special needs, ,

A High Court judge ruled that Michael Gove abused his powers when he axed BSF projects for six local authorities

Picture Michael Gove
Open mouthed at his own effrontery?

“Wasteful and bureaucratic” were the words education secretary Michael Gove MP used when he announced the demise of Building Schools for the Future (BSF). I was working with Accessible Futures Ltd and Northgate at the time of the election, supporting Kent County Council as it sought to modernise a group of special schools.
We were working with several special schools, each of which had its own distinctive problems. There was Foreland, a special school for children with complex and profound difficulties. Because of the nature of their disabilities, some children die before they finish their schooling at Foreland and one of the sensitive organisational challenges facing the BSF team was how to relocate their ashes to the new school grounds. Is this what Gove meant by wasteful and bureaucratic?

 St Anthony’s School caters for students aged 5-16 with a range of behavioural, emotional, social and learning difficulties. They had a good ratio of computers to children but needed robust laptops for the children who have dyspraxia or might misuse computers on a bad day. Laleham Gap School is the county’s specialist provision for high functioning pupils aged 3-16 with autistic spectrum disorders or speech and language disorders and has a residential unit for those children who cannot go home.

These schools were all victims of the BSF cuts and the pupils will lose out.
See the full version of my article and join the debate at Merlin John Online http://www.agent4change.net/policy/bsfpcp/828-bsf-abuse-of-power-ruling-a-chance-to-right-a-wrong.html

Dyslexia and Dyspraxia

Literacy, software, special needs,

I am writing a book for Crimson Publishing called How to Help your Dyslexic and Dyspraxic Child. It is aimed at the parent market and gives ideas for activities to do at home, how to get an assessment, confidence building. I have just typed a plan and pasted the text into Wordle which makes a word cloud from any piece of text.  The more often a word appears in the text, the more prominent it is in the Word Cloud.

a word cloud from pasted textLooks like the key words are games, co-ordination, spelling activities and memory. Yup that seems about right.. Better stop playing and get writing!

And the winner is …Proloquo2go

BETT, disability, New technologies, software, special needs, ,
Proloquo2go wins the award
Sal and comedian Alun Cochrane meet the winners from Proloquo2go

Rebecca Bright is a Speech and Language therapist and has been closely involved with Proloquo2go so she was delighted to learn that it had won the BETT Special Needs Award 2011. It is an app which can be used on an iPad or iPhone to give a voice to those who have a disability such as cerebral palsy or autism which prevents them getting their message across.

Proloquo2go is an affordable solution for those who need communication aids. There are many specialist augmentative and assistive communication (AAC) devices on the market but they often cost thousands of pounds and demand outstrips supply so some young people are left literally without a voice. Now, with increased funding restrictions, there are more people who need a reasonably priced aid and Proloquo2go offers access to many people who would formerly have found AAC out of reach.
Proloquo2go
AAC in your pocket

“Proloquo2go is also very socially acceptable,” said Rebecca. “It works on devices which everyone else has or wants to have so it is not seen as a specialist device for people with disabilities This has had a knock on effect. In the past some learners were unwilling to use their communication aids outside the classroom or home because it marked them out as being different but now that stigma is removed. There are over 300,000 apps on iTunes and we are finding that users are going for a mix and match approach. They might use Proloquo2go symbols for a message and then switch into YouTube to show a video and then call up photos of their family as part of a conversation. All of us at Proloquo2go, the developers AssistiveWare and those of us who work at the UK partner TherapyBox  are delighted to win the award. It is good news for us but it is also good news for those who need communication aids. It shifts the spotlight from dedicated technology to low cost, mainstream mobile technology.

Watch a video t osee how Proloquo2go changed one little boy’s life.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulf11Kg8-lI

Final Leg of Special Needs Award

BETT, disability, software, special needs

The BETT Special Needs Award 2011 will be announced at the Hilton Park Lane on Wednesday 12th January. Six entries have been shortlisted and they represent the diversity of products for young people with disabilities and learning difficulties.

 Two products are aimed at literacy:  Catch Up Literacy Digital Games 3 is for struggling readers aged 8 to 14 working at NC Levels 1-3. It works on high frequency words, comprehension and recall, segmenting and blending phonemes and is available in Welsh too.  JISC’s MyStudyBar is a great money saving tool. It brings together freeware and open source software for students who have problems with planning, reading, writing, This free download has been used by learners as far afield as New Zealand and Australia and is likely to be very popular in these money straitened times.

 Pupils who need help with speech often need expensive specialist Augmentative Assistive Communication devices but now there is another solution with Proloquo2Go.  It is an app which will run on an iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. It has natural sounding text-to-speech voices, up-to-date symbols and an inbuilt vocabulary of over 7000 items. Another hi-tech solution is Nisai Virtual Academy which takes education out to pupils who cannot go to school. It offers qualifications from Key Stage 2 – Key Stage 5 and includes live lessons with teachers and other students from all over the UK.

HelpKidzLearn
free games for switch users

 Pupils with more profound disabilities will welcome TTS Sound Shuffle, a simple device that records up to four minutes of multiple messages and plays them back randomly or sequentially. It’s great for audio recordings for non- readers and ideal for adding sound or voice to wall displays. The final shortlisted entry is HelpKidzLearn, a set of free games which offer fun and purposeful activities for young switch users. Try whacking gophers down a drainpipe – great for develop anticiopation skills – and create a digital magic potion: leg of frog, eye of newt, and of course, lots of slime. Lovely!

 The final decision on the winner of the BETT Special Needs Award 2011 will be announced on Wednesday night but all these entries will certainly find new audiences in 2011.

 http://www.catchup.org.uk/

http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.ac.uk/eduapps/mystudybar.php

http://www.nisaiva.com

http://www.proloquo2go.com/

http://www.tts-group.co.uk/

http://www.helpkidzlearn.com/

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