[senit] Re: Who is providing you with support in the field of ICTand Inclusion?

From my own perspective, SENIT provides valuable support and I agree with

Hi Lesley,

I too meant to reply to this, but I did not want to give misinformation as I
have only taken up the ICT Leader role this year and am still finding my
feet.

As far as I am aware, in our LA, we have to buy into the LA's ICT support
service and we are one of only three (I think) schools in the borough who do
not. We decided not to as we felt the level of service provision was not
good value - I think it includes three days of consultancy annually from the
team and maybe some other stuff too and I'm not sure what the cost is, but
somewhere in the region of several hundred pounds. We felt there was not the
expertise amongst the LA ICT Team to make the consultancy really valuable.

That said, I have been attending some of the ICTCo Forums and other CPD
offered by the LA just to orientate myself in the wider picture - these vary
in their usefulness. This is free to schools within the borough, although it
was remarked that they may have to start charging schools who do not buy
into their service!

The LA ICT Team who I have been in contact with have been very helpful, but
I have not approached them about anything directly SEN related and I think
that it would probably be outside their comfort zone.

We are lucky enough to have CENMAC based at our secondary feeder school
(we're primary) and I have arranged for them to provide some Clicker 5
training for 8 of our staff (three of us are going on the Crick Soft Clicker
training) and then we are going to cascade that by pairing up classes (we
have 20 classes) for a couple of whole school staff meetings, so everyone
(teachers and LSAs) at least gets the opportunity to see Clicker in action
and learns how to edit a grid (if not create their own - aim high!).

In the Summer term, we're going to do a similar thing with SwitchIt Maker2
and ChooseIt Maker2, which should work well as they are SO simple to use.

So, we're providing a lot of our own CPD for staff and I'm also doing some
support for individual children, staff or classes. Since I have taken up the
post, my school has been very supportive of my personal CPD, allowing me to
attend 2 days at BETT, which I made full use of, attending 9 seminars over
the two days, as well as having a good look around and talking to people. I
have also been on an Inclusive Technology day, which was also very useful; a
LA "Leadership and ICT" course, which was quite useful, although my role is
somewhat different from a mainstream model; and an LGfL course, which again,
was fairly useful in giving me an overview of LGfL.

>From my own perspective, SENIT provides valuable support and I agree with
Sean O'Sullivan and Lesley Rahamin that face-to-face opportunities to
discuss specific issues re ICT and SEN are invaluable and rare. Also, I had
a look at the Atomic Learning site that Sean flagged up and something like
that which provided training for the software we use in special schools
would be REALLY useful. And it would be nice to have some guidance from
government sources which was specific to children with the sorts of
difficulties that we work with.

Anyway, that's far too long and rambling an answer, but you did ask...

Claire Barnes
Willow Dene School

-----Original Message-----
From: Lesley Rahamin [mailto:lesley.rahamin at btinternet.com] 
Sent: 22 January 2007 20:02
To: senit at lists.becta.org.uk
Subject: [senit] Re: Who is providing you with support in the field of
ICTand Inclusion?

Hello everyone

I said I would summarise the responses I received when I asked the question,
"Who is providing you with support in the field of ICT and Inclusion?"
Although very few teachers responded, their provision ranged from 'nothing
formal' through SENIT to LEAs with good systems in place.  More responses
came from those providing the support, describing the sort of support that
they provided and to whom.

I've ended up with more questions than answers.  Here are a few:

Is the LEA support inclusive enough to be appropriate to those working with
learners who have physical and/or sensory difficulties or perhaps profound
and/or complex learning difficulties?  Judith Stansfield asked the question
"Is the support for specialists and/or mainstream teachers and do they allow
people from outside the area or from independent schools to take part?" I'm
pretty long in the tooth now, and perhaps the inclusion movement has
resulted in a more inclusive attitude by the providers of training to
mainstream schools, but I remember having to work out for myself how I was
going to adapt the content of courses to the students I was working with.

Is the trend towards commercial suppliers providing separate information and
training on their particular products?   Clicker Days, Inclusive Days etc
are successful in providing opportunities, not only to learn about their
products, but also for the attendees to talk to fellow practitioners.  Where
else can practitioners (often isolated from others in similar situations)
meet?  I am a great believer in email forums such as SENIT but they are no
substitute to meeting face-to-face.  Becta used to put on conferences many
moons ago that provided just that.

Does the support go beyond access technology?  How can assistive technology
practitioners assess a student's access needs if they do not know what the
student is supposed to be accessing?  Finding a way of removing the physical
barriers to learning is only one part of the solution.

Sean O'Sullivan referred to the questions being asked by Adam Wait and John
Galloway and concluded that, ". this is another area in  which we could
fruitfully ask ourselves to not only record what we have had so far, but
more importantly, what do we want and need?"

I know what has been most useful for me so far and that is the support of
fellow professionals working in the same field.  But as to the future... for
once this is something that I feel I should not comment on because I (like
many others in our field) am approaching retiring age.  It is up to
practising teachers to say what they want, as Sean has done.  If we don't
ask we won't get!

Thanks to everyone who responded,

Lesley Rahamin

Education Consultant