I consult with school districts in Northern and Central New Jersey, making Assistive Technology (AT) recommendations for students with cognitive, learning and motor disabilities.
I’ve been using Crick Software products for many years, and I was really excited when the Clicker Apps came out for the iPad. One of the apps that I am recommending a lot at the moment is Clicker Docs.
Clicker Docs is a word processor for the iPad which incorporates a wide range of support features for students who have challenges with the writing process, including auditory feedback as sentences are punctuated, phonetic, speech-supported word prediction, and customizable Word Banks.
As with all the Clicker Apps, the User Interface in Clicker Docs is both intuitive and inviting to the students, and the ability to customize the environment to a student’s needs is critical for many of the students that I work with.
One of my favorite features in Clicker Docs is the way you can create custom Word Banks for use with particular topics and focus areas. It’s a huge benefit for both teachers and students that you can simply copy and paste text from any source and create an alphabetized Word Bank with just a few taps. If the required words are more specific to a student’s immediate needs, I often suggest using the dictation button to create the word lists for the Word Bank – such a time-saver! Having created a Word Bank, its vocabulary is temporarily downloaded by the predictor database and suggested to students at a much higher frequency. The benefit to the students is that they get topic specific word prediction, without necessarily having to go and find the words they want.
Like all the Clicker Apps, Clicker Docs is supported by an expanding collection of free, cross-curricular resources on LearningGrids.com – all you have to do is tap on the ‘LearningGrids’ button in the File Explorer view and you are taken directly to the site without leaving the app. Find the resource you want, tap on ‘Run Now’ and the file is downloaded and opened in seconds. You can customize it inexactly the same way as if you made it yourself. For me, this direct access to LearningGrids from inside the app is my favorite feature of all!