[SENco-forum] BECTA & ICT /exam access

I am hoping that Klaus may be lurking......

My daughter is in an anomalous situation bought about by having a BECTA CAP
supplied laptop with TextHELP.  She also had a printer and scanner.

Between these she became an independent learner able to scan, have the
computer read, type with the help of predictive text and most importantly
use the read back facility to keep her place an d train of thought.  Also
she can choose the correct word by using her speaking spellchecker.

She relies on this most as her decoding ability and visual recognition for
longer words is so bad that she cannot tell the difference between the words
offered by a normal spellchecker.  Her spelling is random and a word such as
'delicious' may be typed (on a good day) as 'delishus'.  The spellchecker
offers her the following:

Dilates, delicious, dilutes,danishes, delights, deletes  etc., -no problem
for us but zero recognition from her.

Now she clearly knows what word she needs, and ergo what it means, so what
is the problem with her using the computer's talking spellchecker to
identify the correct word?

However in exams it seems that she has to turn everything off and the
computer becomes a typewriter which is no use to her.  She is not typing
because her writing is illegible in the 'difficult to read' sense. She
cannot have a reader/scribe because it is not her normal way of working and
she does not need either of these.  Transcription is a possibility, but I
don't fancy anyone's chances of understanding what she has written unless
they also use a computer & spellchecker.

She has no advantage over others.  The spellchecker is slower to use than
'knowing' how to spell.

Does BECTA have any influence over policy that appertains to use of ICT in
class & exams?

Sharon Tringham

-

No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.5.516 / Virus Database: 269.20.9/1294 - Release Date: 22/02/2008
18:39