• Features

• 27/11/2015

The benefits of using AV technologies to bring teaching to life for students are well documented, but perhaps this is most clearly seen when meeting the challenges associated with teaching pupils with special educational needs (SEN). InAVate spoke to a pioneering headteacher who is making the very best use of technology in her school in Scotland.

The Isobel Mair school in East Renfrewshire, Scotland marked its 25th birthday this year, celebrating a quarter of a century of educating children from five to 18 with a broad range of support needs from severe to very complex learning difficulties.

It’s a huge test for any school to try and discover what motivates children and young adults, let alone a school with such a wide range of additional needs. Any solution needs to be easy to use, flexible enough to appeal to a wide range of ages and physical needs, and also become a long-term educational aide.

Fortunate for the school then that in 2004 they acquired the services of head teacher Mari Wallace, an educator with great experience in the use of ICT in education, and special needs. She arrived with a clear vision that ICT provision would be key to the development of teaching within the school.

“When I arrived in the school they had computers in the classrooms, and the teachers knew how to log on and word process, but they were using what we call programme software to support learning and teaching. There were computers in every classroom but it wasn’t a particularly well-resourced school.

“Because of my history in other schools, I came with the vision, the skills and the contacts to develop the ICT programme. Through our staff development budget I brought in a woman I had worked with previously as an ICT consultant. She came in and started to undertake a very rigorous in house programme of staff development – assessing and developing the staff’s ICT skills. The aim was really to foster the creativity of the staff to see how they could use the ICT successfully to meet the needs of our learners.”

Between them Mari and the consultant investigated the available options through visiting BETT and other education technology events to try out a number of potential solutions.

“When we first started out, we had one Smart board in a room. All the kids were time tabled to go in the Smart board room so many times a week – a half hour slot two or three times a week. Now we have one in every room and they’re never off.

“It was like switching on a light. I have a brilliant staff here, and as soon as they saw the impact that this approach could have on the learning and teaching within their classroom, and how it’s inspired the children to be more highly motivated and to really extend their learning, the teachers were absolutely hooked.”

Teachers are a creative bunch anyway, especially those who specialise in special educational needs, it’s often enough to give them information on the tools available to them. Isobel Mair was certainly able to do that, partly through the generosity of the local education authority, and also via donations from benefactors and parents.

“We threw a lot of money at, through buying in the development consultant, buying in the teaching cover so that our staff could be trained, investing a lot in resources as well – additional computers, digital cameras and different software programmes, and training the support staff as well. Everybody in the school embraced this approach.

“That was from October 2004 to April or May the following year. From the staff came the demand for much more of this equipment. W’e want more technology, more opportunities to learn we want more time to do this,’ they said. It really sort of grew from there. Our children deserve the best, and the teachers were demanding the best resources. So it was over to them really!”

“We then had to go out to find the right solutions, with the help of our consultant. We’ve continued that approach for the last 3.5 years. The emphasis has changed a little bit since we’ve now built up quite a high level of expertise in the school, and we’ve brought in new staff with their own expertise too. The training side of things is now really handled by our existing staff, but we continue to invest in our ICT consultant to make sure that we stay on the ball. She just knows things, and what’s going on now and also what’s on the horizon. She spends most of her time with the ICT co-ordinators rather than the staff now.

Currently Isobel Mair school is spread over three sites, but that’s due to change in 2010, with the completion of a new dedicated building. Mari described the current set up of a typical classroom, and also some of the reasoning behind the equipment choices they made.

“Each classroom now has a Smartboard 2000i, that means I’ve got twelve of these in the school. Every room has a desktop PC, laptops and at least one digital camera. Some of the classrooms have got digital video cameras – a lot of the classrooms have iPod shuffles for the kids to promote independent reading – it helps to prevent them from being distracted.”

The 2000i is a rear projection unit supplied by Steljes, and the rear projection was a critical factor in its selection over other interactive solutions. Whilst being more costly than its competitors, Mari says that the total absence of shadowing is critical: “We’ve been to BETT and looked at all the models available, and although the projector arms are getting shorter there are still shadows, which is really, really off putting for our kids.”

The three sites have videoconferencing facilities to allow staff to keep in touch and also to have shared sessions with the kids. That runs over the local authority IT network, so the quality isn’t that great but it’s fine to communicate. The cameras and codecs are attached directly to the rear projection units.

Having all the latest kit is only half the battle though: “One of the ways that we’ve got the most of the technology is by building a really vast amount of our own resources using the Notebook software with the boards. We’ve all manner of content depending on what engages the children best – so we’ve Dr Who Maths or Eastenders Maths and what-have-you. If you just gave our kids a worksheet with sums on it, you’d get nowhere.”

“With the resources we’ve generated there’s colour, there’s interactivity, there are visual and audible rewards triggered by right answers. Because of all material we’ve now generated we actually ran out of space to store it all. When we won £3000 for the BECTA excellence award we invested in a new central server. This means that the staff can more easily share the resources and modify the kits for their own use.”

One thing the school hasn’t really invested in is technology such as assistive listening devices. These aren’t really necessary in a class situation where there are only 4/5 kids per member of staff – ratios typical in dedicated special needs units. This would of course differ in a mainstream school.

The expertise from Isobel Mair is not restricted to the school. It’s now a resource that can be tapped by other establishments in the area. There are regular visits from teachers in mainstream schools, coming to see goes on.

Mari Wallace concluded: “Al the teachers in the school have embraced the use of ICT. And they keep pushing me for more. Our server is invaluable and we are in the process of purchasing a voting system that we will use with our pupils as part of our assessment process.”