Darlene Brodbeck

Works for Area Cooperative Educational Services (ACES), a Regional Educational Service Center servicing twenty-six school districts in south central Connecticut.

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!

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 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.

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!

We can use Clicker with all of our students

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.

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!

Clicker 5 has a lot of promising new features for the population that I work with. The new voices; the pop-up grids, the ‘forced order’ feature (which is outstanding); and the pop-up keyboard – these have all been fantastic features for us. It works great on our restricted network.

One of the more powerful features is that it saves all of the Grid Set as one package with the photos and the sounds, and you do not have to save separate pages – much better than Clicker 4. This allows us to share grids with other classrooms effortlessly.

Staff can email grids to each other for sharing, or post them on the shared folder on the network – both methods foster collaboration. Staff members were creating grids and talking books to use in their classrooms after a brief intro to the program.

I can only imagine what ideas will evolve from the more advanced workshops that will take place in the future!

The software is so valuable for children like him

Parents have also been excited about the features of Clicker. I shared the program with a former student of mine. His mother was thrilled with the talking book idea along with the ease of setting up the grids. She thought that he could place pictures from family vacations in a talking book. All of the information about the vacation would be typed into a text box so that he could easily share his experiences with his peers with one click of his switch. In her words, “Those one-liners from his portable device are really getting old!” She welcomed the new ideas that Clicker had to offer. The software is so valuable for children like him.

Another parent was excited because her son would be able to communicate in the classroom using Clicker, and then the grids and/or documents are printed out and she could share part of his day with him. She was very excited about the possibilities for her son.

Thank you for creating such a wonderful and diverse piece of software for all of my students! It is greatly appreciated.

I am so excited that we have a piece of software that can meet the needs of our students and I can focus my training time with the staff so that they can become more knowledgeable about the program. We are always coming up with new ideas to use the program.

I have truly enjoyed working with your staff and the high level of support that I have received from tech support and Deb Barrows, my Crick Software representative. I spoke with her on the phone today and she just wanted to know if I needed anything else. I have worked with many vendors in my capacity but no one else has given me that level of support. It has been a wonderful experience! Thank you for creating such a wonderful and diverse piece of software for all of my students! It is greatly appreciated.