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TSBVI Technology Institute

Clicker 4
Use for Students with Visual Impairments and Additional Disabilities

or
Who Can Use This and Why?

by Holly Cooper

Clicker 4 is a multimedia word processing tool with writing support. Developed by John Crick in Great Britain, it is used in general education settings for learners who need support to produce written work.

Clicker 4 is an extremely flexible tool, which we are excited about using with students with severe and multiple disabilities. Adults supporting the needs of such students can design Clicker grids which function much like voice output augmentative communication devices such as Dynavox or Alphatalker.

Clicker 4 can be used to create communication grids similar to overlays and linked together to offer choices of a variety of topics or extended discussion around a theme.

Clicker 4 is available in both Windows and Mac versions. It's inexpensive, a single user copy is available for $199 as of December 2001. A free 30 day trial version can be downloaded from their website at www.cricksoft.com.

The following are some samples of grids designed for use with students of a variety of ability levels.

Basic Learner

Does your student really make intentional choices?

Do you want to test his or her reaction time and adjust scanning speed and switch activation skills?

What size pictures, colors of background, font size and speech are appropriate?

If your student has used a simple direct access voice output communication device with a limited number of choices, stretch his or her skills by starting with some easy grids that they can practice with the support of a familiar adult.

This grid was made to be set up with an auditory scan which speaks the name of the animal. The student then activated the switch to choose the animal. Hitting the switch caused the sound the animal makes to be produced. The word labeling the animal or sound was sent to the built-in word processor, called Clicker Writer.

We used this grid with a student who needed switch practice. We suggested the paraprofessional sit with the student and ask her to tell the student to "Find the ___". After the student repeatedly demonstrated that she could activate a specific cell named by an adult, she could then have some time with the grid to make her own choices.

Here are some other grids we developed which were designed to be used in the same way. Think of students you know and the interests they have for activities such as this.

We made the Names grid for a student learning how to use Clicker 4. The names we put in her grid were names of her brother, sister and friends at school. The person working with her then asked her to choose her favorite person, or who she sat with at lunch. Activating the switch caused Clicker 4 to speak the name.

The Colors grid speaks the name of the color in the scan mode, but when the user activates the switch to select a color, she is rewarded by a sound from the built-in Clicker 4 sound files. These sounds include a baby laughing (our favorite and very infectious) a phone ringing, a drum, and a car skidding. This was a lot of fun for the student and her helper.

Building Communication

Once the learner has some practice listening for a choice and using the switch to select a choice, introduce opportunities to use Clicker 4 in a functional context.

Choice making is always a good place to start, and later choices making activities can be developed into conversational skills.

The student using these grids listened to the choices offered via the auditory scan of the cells, and activated the switch to build a sentence. These grids require only two choices to make a sentence. For Clicker Writer to speak the complete sentence, it must encounter a period. These cells are contain a period so Clicker Writer will speak after an item in the second column is chosen. More challenging grids might offer the period as a separate choice so the user could construct complex sentences.

Sentence Building

If your user is learning about particular ways to make sentences, you can build grids to reinforce those skills.

These grids illustrate ways Clicker 4 is being used as writing support for academic learners. Many grids like this are available on Clicker 4's website as this is the population for which Clicker 4 was originally developed, and still most widely used.

We can make ideas like this more accessible to our students by breaking up these complex grids into pieces and linking them together like pages in a book, so each page or grid has a more limited number of choices so the user doesn't have to wait to listen to in the auditory scan.

Communication About a Topic

Most of our classrooms do instruction centered around a thematic unit, or a particular topic. Thematic units are appropriate across a variety of ability levels and ages, as well as classroom types. Grids can be built in Clicker 4 that support thematic units. When lesson plans are being developed, build some basic grids at the same time, before instruction actually begins. You can expand on these as student's interest in particular ideas develop.

Seasons

Here is a pre-made grids from the Clicker 4 website.

Here is a sample of text produced by the above set of grids.

My Favorites

Here's a sample of some grids we made for secondary aged students.

Below is a sample of text produced by the above grids.

Switch Access

For students with visual impairments and additional disabilities the ability to use a switch to access choices in Clicker 4 is one of it's most powerful features.

By adjusting the settings on a grid, the teacher can set the grid to speak the contents of each cell in the grid. For larger grids, scanning can be set so that the first item in each row or column is spoken by Clicker 4. In row or column scanning mode, the user can activate the switch when the first choice in the row is spoken, then Clicker 4 reads each item in the row. Activating the switch again selects the choice, and when a period is added, Clicker Writer reads the entire sentence. This is a pretty complex cognitive task, especially for a user who is functionally blind, so consider it an advanced task. See the Tutorial built in to Clicker 4 or our lessons for instruction on how to do this.

Other Uses

Clicker 4 can send text to it's own word processor, called Clicker Writer, but it can also sent text to other applications. Again, for instructions on this see the built in tutorial or our lessons.

Clicker 4 can send text to another word processor on the same computer or to Outlook Express so the student can send e-mail to friends. We here at Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired find e-mail communication very highly motivating for our functional academic students. For students who are a bit lower, but still motivated by communicating with friends, the voice output capabilities of Clicker Writer, Connect Outload, JAWS, or other screen reading software can make two way communication accessible for the functionally blind or non-reading user.

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Last Revision: October 23, 2002