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Engaging children with special needs: a case study of St Luke's
By Kim Thomas |
St Luke's is a county special school for pupils with moderate learning difficulties and associated needs. Based in Redbourn, Hertfordshire, the school has 167 pupils aged between 9 and 16. Some children have additional special needs such as autism, Asperger's syndrome or physical or hearing impairments. Most pupils have some difficulty with reading and writing, which means that the school has had to find more imaginative ways of engaging them in learning.
ICT has opened a door of new possibilities for the school, says John Warwick, Deputy Head at St Luke's: "Technology offers access to learning that traditional methods don't offer in the same way. Access to ICT is much more hands-on than learning by reading." By embracing new technologies enthusiastically, the school has arguably found ways of motivating learners that could serve as a model for other special schools. It has already won two awards for its use of technology: the Hertfordshire Special Schools 'Best Practice in ICT' award and first place in 'Best Practice in video-conferencing' from the East of England Broadband Network (E2BN).
Video-conferencing is one of the most successful ways St Luke's has found of engaging children. Three years ago the school took part in a DfES project to evaluate the impact of video-conferencing on teaching and learning, and in 2003 it won money from E2BN to investigate the potential of video-conferencing to develop pupils' communication and presentation skills. The school has been using the technology both to share lessons with other schools and to take part in remote lessons with institutions such as the Cabinet War Rooms and the National Portrait Gallery.
These lessons are designed to integrate with the curriculum that the children are already following - it's simply that the teacher is brought to the classroom by video-conferencing link rather than being physically present. In one session, an expert from the National Portrait Gallery gave a lesson on Elizabethan portraits. The expert was able to show exhibits from the gallery and the children were able to ask questions, and increase their understanding. The technology becomes invisible.
St Luke's is now in the second year of a three-year British Council project called 'Come Together, Right Now', in which mainstream schools from Spain, Norway, Italy and Germany, as well as St Luke's and another British school, are able to collaborate via e-mail, a web-based discussion board and video-conferencing, using the Open University's FlashMeeting software. Part of the project's aim has been to build up the children's confidence to use their verbal communication skills, says John. English is the language of communication - the children based in mainland Europe all learn English as a second language and this has provided excellent opportunities for the partner school pupils to practise their spoken English. Meanwhile, the teachers communicate with each other weekly using the FlashMeeting webcam technology to discuss and plan further video-conference lessons between the schools.
Using the video-conferencing link, the children have been able to share information and ideas with their European counterparts. Last year, for example, St Luke's had weekly classroom lessons with the Norwegian school in which pupils looked at different foods. More recently, the different schools have been making PowerPoint presentations about their own local environments and their national traditions, so the children have had an opportunity to learn about each other's cultures. The project has also given the school the opportunity to take some pupils abroad to visit the other participating schools for some first-hand experience.
There have been unexpected benefits to the use of video-conferencing, says John: "We've noticed that some autistic children have problems making eye contact. However, using video-conferencing, they do make eye contact." The school is going to take part in research by Hertfordshire University this year to investigate how video-conferencing might be used effectively with autistic learners. Similarly, deaf pupils have responded very well to the technology because it is such a visual medium - during the session with the National Portrait Gallery, some of the deaf children were so engaged in the lesson they physically reached out and touched the projected image of objects on the screen.
The school also uses digital video technology to enable the children to create short animations. The children, says John, have made some "splendid creative artwork", but the technology can be used in other ways too - for example, by recording the process that they're using to cook a recipe, the children can more easily remember the order in which they need to be doing things. For pupils who have difficulty writing, this is a much more effective way of reinforcing their learning than by writing it down. The school does, of course, expect children to write some of the time, but the point of using technology, says John, is that it enables them to make progress in their learning that they might not otherwise make.
To the same end, the school is also involved in a local authority project on the introduction of interactive voting handsets. Teachers can ask questions, and pupils vote their response or put in their own answers. It makes students less passive, says John; many find writing difficult, so the use of handsets makes them more motivated and actively involved. It also helps teachers with assessments: "At the end of the lesson you can see whether youngsters have understood the concepts of the lesson, and that will impact on your next lessons."
One of the difficulties with teaching special needs children, says John, is that they can find it hard to remember information, so the challenge for teachers is to find new ways of reinforcing what pupils have learnt: "Our youngsters can learn something once, but it doesn't meant they've retained it. The more variety in the way teachers teach and pupils learn, the better."
John believes that the fast rate of change in ICT means that teachers will have to work hard to keep pace with new technological developments. It has been worth it, he says, because the technology works so effectively with special needs children: "Their motivation to learn is really high and they're learning without realising it."
Links
St Luke's School: www.stlukes.herts.sch.uk
Come Together Right Now: www.come-together-right-now.org
Becta Research: www.becta.org.uk/research
October 2005
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