Something that always brings a smile to my face is when I hear feedback about how Clicker and DocsPlus have impacted children’s lives.
During lockdown, when we provided schools and parents with free access to our software, we received some amazing success stories of children writing successfully – some for the very first time! In this post I thought I would share just a few of these.
I received a lovely message from a mum who said that access to Clicker 8 had made her life so much easier during lockdown. Two of her children have special needs, and with Clicker they were more engaged with writing than they ever were before. Her sons particularly identified with the built-in ‘Alfie’ voice as it sounded just like them, and made writing a lot more fun!
A contact of mine was working with a boy who was very intelligent and could easily understand the material covered in his lessons, but whose dyslexia made it difficult for him to record what he knew. Fortunately, he had a great interest in and aptitude for technology – which is where I was able to help him. I was able to support him with DocsPlus so that he could complete a project on Professor Stephen Hawking. He was thrilled that he could paste text from online sources into the software and have it read back to him. He especially enjoyed correcting the pronunciation of the more technical terminology in the Word Pool. His teacher noted that this was the first time since she had been teaching him that she had seen him not just smile, but laugh, and genuinely enjoy writing.
In the past he had dreaded giving presentations to the class, but this time he was able to connect his laptop to the SMART Board and demonstrate his knowledge. He even used a synthetic voice similar to Hawking's own during the presentation! It was amazing to see such a turnaround from this child thanks to the confidence DocsPlus had given him.
I also spoke with another school contact who told me of a Year 3 girl they were working with who had suddenly stopped talking. She refused to speak at school and at home and would only whisper to one other child in the class. The school wanted to help her with her anxiety, so they set up Clicker for her on a laptop. We found that she was able to communicate using Clicker's ‘Rosie’ as her voice. This went on for a few weeks, as she used Clicker to talk to her teacher and the other pupils, until she started to use Clicker to talk about the reasons for her anxiety… then, the support she got helped her to speak out loud again - she even went on to do a presentation to the whole class about Olly Murs!
These are just a handful of the positive stories I’ve received over the last few weeks – it’s been amazing to hear them all! If you have any tales of how Clicker or DocsPlus has had an impact on anyone you know and would like to share, please send us an email via info@cricksoft.com or post it to our Clicker Community Facebook group.
