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 Darlene Brodbeck works for Area Cooperative Educational Services (ACES), a Regional Educational Service Center servicing twenty-six school districts in south central Connecticut. In addition to servicing the surrounding districts, ACES also operates schools designed to meet the specific needs of the region.
Darlene works in two of these programs (Whitney High East/West and Village School) assisting approximately 350 students, age 4 to 21, with severe communication, cognitive, physical, behavioral and medical needs. She collaborates with approximately 50 teachers, 30 therapists, and a host of paraprofessionals and one-to-one aides, to empower students with the use of assistive technology.
She writes:
Finding software to meet the diverse needs of the students within our programs is always a challenge as we service students pre-k through age 21. In designing the environments for maximum success, we look for programs that can reinforce the universal design for learning. I think we hit the jackpot with Clicker 5!
At Closing the Gap, the Crick crew demonstrated to me that the new features of Clicker 5 were well worth the upgrade from Clicker 4. I brought the information back to my administrators and Chief Technology Officer who authorized the purchase to obtain enough copies so that we could install the program on at least one desktop in every classroom, the labs, and on every classroom teacher’s laptop, including the speech therapists and behavior analysts. |
"I think we hit the jackpot with Clicker 5!" |
"I am amazed at the possibilities of this program!" |
We are having a lot of fun with Clicker. In my workshops I demonstrate the diverse features of Clicker, illustrating how it can be a scaffold to support all students, and have received positive feedback from the staff. They love the use of videos in the grids and talking books, not to mention the availability of hundreds of already made (and FREE) grids from the LearningGrids.com website.
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Staff members can quickly edit grids to make them even more applicable to their curriculum. The ability to differentiate for a wide continuum of learners has been the most positive feature and I am using it to implement UDL in our buildings. I am amazed at the possibilities of this program!
I have been able to demonstrate to staff that this one program can assist our students that are functioning at the cause-and-effect stage of development through the students that are able to write without the graphic support. I am demonstrating that the program aligns with Stages, as we have all of our students identified on the Stages continuum (Madalaine Pugliese's work). It really drives the point home that we can use Clicker with all of our students. |
"We can use Clicker with all of our students"
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In addition, it has the ability to function as a communication device for our non-verbal learners. We can even use Clicker 5 in the music classroom as a tool to have students select songs from a grid and listen to their selection (like a jukebox). The songs can be files of the actual songs or recordings of the children singing. The students can also have a printout of the lyrics with the graphic support to help them learn the words to a particular song. AMAZING!
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