Using Assistive Technology in the Classroom

Supporting dyslexic students to become independent learners

There are a multitude of benefits to having good access to ICT in the classroom but, for our pupils none more so than the opportunity to use assistive technology. The Unicorn School is a school for dyslexic pupils and, for us, giving the pupils the skills to be independent learners is really important. Since moving to Microsoft in September 2019 we have subsequently introduced one to one devices across the school. The majority of these devices are Surface Go’s which are easy for the pupils to manage but importantly also have digital inking capability.

Immersive Reader

Immersive Reader is an amazing tool which allows pupils to access texts independently in the way that works for them. They can have the

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text read to them and it has a multitude of voices they can choose from – including local accents! It will split words into syllables and can also identify parts of speech. For pupils who want to read themselves but need less visual distraction, you can highlight 1, 3 or 5 lines of text at a time. Since introducing Immersive Reader in school we have seen pupils be enabled to tackle texts independently that previously would have been inaccessible to them.

Dictate

Many of our pupils have very good oral skills and verbally are able to express themselves really well. However, when it comes to getting their ideas down on paper they struggle for a number of reasons – poor working memory, and poor handwriting to name but two. Dictate removes these barriers for pupils as they can speak their answers and it will convert it into text. Pupils can then use Immersive Reader to read back their answers allowing them to be totally independent and increasing their confidence considerably.

Collections

Organisational skills are often challenging for our pupils and finding websites they have successfully used previously can be really tricky. Collections in Microsoft Edge allows pupils to bookmark websites into folders for easy access. They can also just drag a paragraph or picture from a site rather than select the whole webpage, but in doing so it keeps the source site available so they can find the webpage again. Staff as well as pupils have benefited from these amazing tools and the effect at school has been really positive.

SALLIE GREENHALGH, Academic & Digital Lead

www.unicornoxford.co.uk

TURN TO P59 to read about SEN support available at university