| |
|
 Clicker®
Case Studies
Debbie Crookshanks
Holywood Primary School Co. Down N.Ireland
I am the ICT co-ordinator and year 2 (5-and-6-year-olds) class teacher and I use Clicker extensively for topic-based whole-class teaching. All children in the class make use of Clicker, but the grids they use are differentiated to make them appropriate to the children’s ability levels. That’s a great feature of Clicker, it facilitates all academic levels. Children with special needs use the picture support to help them with their writing. The more able children have more options to enhance their sentence construction with additional adjectives in the sentences. Clicker really does give me lots of options for differentiated teaching. I have evidence attached of less able children having achieved much more by using Clicker. We use a whiteboard or the networked computers in the school to support the children’s work using Clicker for mainly literacy, numeracy and science.
"Clicker really does give me lots
of options for differentiated teaching"One of the Clicker activities I have been using has helped all the children with sentence construction. I downloaded from the website a themed grid about people who help us, that all children could access and use. All abilities were catered for and all children produced very pleasing end copies for themselves. They illustrated them. Some of the children read out their pieces of work to the class, others were displayed in the school and some even put on our school website. By using Clicker, every child, whatever his/her ability, was able to produce a high-quality piece of written work which they could share with the rest of the class, their family and friends and the wider community. I would like to develop an additional homelink where parents and children would be able to access some of the available downloads from your Cricksoft website from our school website. Having been made aware of your website by myself, colleagues have tried and tested some of your products from your website and agree that many materials are academically appropriate and stimulating. Next year I intend to develop one of our P2 themes on the ‘Local Area’ by using the Digital blue camera to record photos and short video clips and incorporate these with the ‘Local Area’ free download from your website.
 We use Clicker in all classes. The younger classes are using it at a topic-based level, whilst further up the school, they are using Clicker to extend and expand their creative writing skills, composing stories and supporting struggling readers and writers.
On our school intranet, we have folders accessible to all staff and children with various pieces of software, many being interactive. These are updated regularly. Some folder headings would be: Key Stage 1 Vocab, KS2 Literacy, Problem Solving Upper Key Stage2 and Lower Key Stage 2.
This year my school was chosen to be in a Northern-Ireland-based pilot project for empowering schools to enhance children’s creativity, using ICT as a tool to do this. Using Clicker has been part of our project and now has a higher profile in the seven schools in my cluster group. Being at the SETT conference in Glasgow in September 2005 and having seen your exhibition stand, I realise the potential use of other Crick software available for Key Stage 1 & 2 curriculum-based activities. I am going to the SETT conference this year again in Glasgow and intend to visit your stand (C32) to evaluate the range of other software your company has, e.g. Jigworks and also discuss upgrading to Clicker 5 in our school.
Entering this competition and showing how I co-ordinate the use of Clicker in our school to enhance the education of all ages and abilities of children, should allow me to win one of the prizes available. I know that my colleagues and the children will benefit from this additional software. I genuinely believe that being aware and using good resources with the children, can further develop children’s skills, knowledge, self-esteem and understanding.
|
|
|
|
