Recently I visited a very inspiring school for the deaf, where I demonstrated some of the ways in which Clicker can support its learners.
Students at this school are between 12 and 18 years old and around eighty percent of them are profoundly deaf with very few using cochlear implants.
For those students who were pre-lingually deaf, the acquisition of language is particularly challenging. Making the link between how a word (or letter) looks and how it sounds is a major issue, and there will often be language and vocabulary delay.
Signing is very different to spoken language, meaning it can be especially difficult to learn the rules of grammar. A resource such as Clicker can provide valuable support, with tabs offering words for each part of the sentence:
Learning that adding an ‘s’ to a word makes a plural, can also be very difficult. I demonstrated how a Clicker activity like this can be made – and personalized – quickly and easily:
I also created this simple resource which allows learners to record themselves adding the ‘s’ sound:
In addition to showing how to use instant pictures in the document and predictor to give pictorial support to the meaning of words, I demonstrated how the school could use its own pictures of students, staff, or the school environment:
