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:
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.
A High Court judge ruled that Michael Gove abused his powers when he axed BSF projects for six local authorities
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.
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.
Looks like the key words are games, co-ordination, spelling activities and memory. Yup that seems about right.. Better stop playing and get writing!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Children’s TV presenter Lady Floella Benjamin is a superstar. She is also a great chair of judges as I discovered yesterday at the Bli National Schools Film and Animation Awards 2010 in Sheffield where a group of educators and journalists spent the day looking at over 40 shortlisted entries covering all the key stages.
We saw reworkings of familiar stories such as the Three Little Pigs and Tell Tale Heart, several pieces on internet safety and lots of entries focusing on environmental issues. There were some strong issues-based pieces covering teenage pregnancy, under age drinking and life in the run down areas found in so many cities in Britain. These would not have looked out of place on Channel 4 and were highly polished productions which avoided the sanctimonious preaching tone often associated with teenage documentaries. Other pieces were very school based and provided a little affectionate mockery of teachers, their habits and mannerisms.
As judges, we learned a lot about film making and animation as we got a crash course in what works and what doesn’t. You could see where entries were under-rehearsed or needed editing. It was obvious where technology dominated and the focus or storyline had become obscured. We talked about everything from the colour of titles to the use of camera angles and sound effects.
Floella is passionate about encouraging children to be creative but she is also a stern critic,†‘Good enough’ is just not good enough. They should be aiming for the best,†she said of one entry. But she was also quick to point out where pupils had conveyed a story or communicated to their audience particularly effectively.
The results of the awards will be announced early in 2011 but you can be certain that whatever form the ceremonies and celebrations take, Floella Benjamin will be there, sharing her passion for creativity and encouraging children to try that little bit harder to be the very best that they can be.
I know it’s a bit early for Christmas but I also know that some of you like to get ahead of the game and plan well in advance. We are told that FREE is a great selling word so put FREE and Christmas together and it has to be a winner. Software supplier Wishtrac is offering a free advent calendar to all schools for use on their interactive whiteboards or computer.
The Advent Calendar comes complete with Christmas music and pupils can also find out about Christmas traditions, such as why we have Christmas trees, or why we pull crackers at Christmas time! It also contains links to non-Christian religious festivals which occur during December, such as Bodhi Day or Hannukah.
In the past two years, over 11,000 classes have downloaded the advent calendar. You can download The Advent Calendar free of charge by clicking here but in the true spirit of Christmas, Wishtrac is asking schools to donate to the charity Action for Children.
It’s autumn. The nights are drawing in and the leaves are falling so this is a really good time to think about PRIZES. Every year at this time, software companies need to do an audit of their latest products and check out potential winners. If you don’t enter, no one will do it for it and there is a world of potential purchasers out there who may never know just how good your software is.
The closing date is 4th October so get your skates on if you haven’t applied yet.
But for those of you in the world of special needs, the nasen awards might be even more relevant. These awards have been going for 18 years and are described as, “amongst the most prestigious in the UK, representing a recognised hallmark of inclusivity and excellence for educational suppliers, authors and publishers.â€
This year nasen has announced a new category : ICT Resource to Support Teaching and Learning. This is to celebrate the power of technology as a tool for communication and they are looking for the most innovative and targeted ICT SEN resources which represent value for money. Entries must have been published between 1st May 2009 and 31st December 2010
The BETT Awards for 2011 are finally open. The awards are the educational technology equivalent of the Oscars and can generate very welcome publicity for small companies.
A device to help children with ADHD
Last year’s special needs short list included two products from TTS Group Limited, Attention Trackerwhich helps children with ADHD to keep on task andChatter Block which can be used for creating stories, sequencing and talk time activities. Other products included Farview from Optelec Limited, a handheld video magnifier, Crick’s online word processor,WriteOnline and CBBC’s Accessible Newsreader, a talking news website which is also switch accessible. The winner was RoboBraille from Royal National College for the Blind in Hereford. This was an internet service which converts digital text documents into Braille or audio file format.
Special needs company Inclusive Technology which runs a Fringe Show at the Hilton Hotel during BETT each year won the prestigious ICT Company of the Year 2010.  The judges praised the company forchampioning the cause of special educational needs/inclusion through ICT. They also said Inclusive Technology had “gone above and beyond the expectations of an ICT-solutions provider.â€
This year’s awards will be run by Emap Connect and BESA (British Educational Suppliers Association). Because the government is closing Becta, the main sponsor of previous awards, the organisers will be charging an entry fee of £175 plus VAT per product (£155 plus VAT for BESA members).
BETT award entries can be completed online at http://www.bettawards.com/. The closing date is October 4 and the shortlist will be announced at the end of October.
Chris Stevens honoured for his work as Head of Inclusion at Becta
I am delighted to report that my former boss Chris Stevens received an OBE in the Honours list at the weekend. Chris was head of Inclusion Policy at Becta from 1996 until 2009. He led the special needs team through several re-organisations and changes of leadership and was respected for his honesty and integrity.
During his tenure, the special needs team worked on many high profile developments including Senco Forum, the CAP Project and the Home Access Project as well as smaller schemes of work such as art and mental health, Community Languages and ESOL.
Chris’s own particular specialism was children and young people with severe learning difficulties and he drew widely on his experience as head of a special school so that work on policy was always informed by practice.
Now retired and living in North Yorkshire, Chris is still involved in the field of technology and special needs. He is on the board of BATA (the British Assistive Technology Association) which campaigns for the rights and interests of those needing assistive technology and provides expert and impartial support and advice to government departments and agencies.
Now that Becta is being closed down, this organisation is likely to influence government policy and Chris’s expertise will be invaluable.
