Today in class, we had the opportunity to learn more about programs that related to the writing process, especially related to students with low literacy rates. I enjoyed using Clicker 5, and can see how it would be beneficial for some of the students that I currently work with in through out school's extended program support classroom. Admittedly, I would be hesitant to use this program with some of the high school students that I currently work with. I realize the "look" of the program can be adapted for older students, but it still seems like a program that some students would feel uncomfortable using in the upper level age group.
Our group had a great time creating our e-book through Clicker 5! It was fun to write a story together, and we also enjoyed picking out the pictures. I'm thinking that if we had that much fun as Masters of Education students using the program, than students in middle school would certainly have a great time creating their own story. Students are often assigned story and poetry writing tasks, in addition to research assignments, throughout many of their literacy based courses like English, Social Studies, and Science. I think this program would make a writing task far less intimidating for a student who has encoding and word recognition difficulties. Performing an assessment using Clicker 5 would also be less intimidating for students with low literacy, as there are so many visual cues can be incorporated to help these students be more successful. I found it very interesting that students with word recognition difficulties are often able to select the correct word when given a word bank to choose from. Very cool!
Looking forward to making use of Clicker 5 for my project, and I hope the student I have this in mind for will enjoy it as well.
