St Giles School

Introduction to St Gilesculsion 6

'In my school we have profound and multiple learning disability students that we are trying to provide with the best learning opportunities. By working with the LGfL team we have been able to create and provide new opportunities for our learners to become part of that whole vast community where we all work together and that has been really, really vital'

Catherine Payne - St Giles School

How do you use technology to meet your learner's needs? 

'If we weren't able to use technology in our classroom with our learners, for the majority of them, they would have absolutely no communication.  Some of them are very good at communicating because they can use their faces, they can use their eyes, they can use small movements of their bodies. We know them very well. Their families know them very, very well. But say, if they were in a situation where they were working with people that didn't know them, they wouldn't be able to say to them, I'm in pain, I'm hungry, I'm thirsty, I'm uncomfortable. We need technology so that they can communicate and live lives as independently as possible. So if somebody came into me and said, right, all this has got to stop. You can't use technology anymore. You can't use switches their lives would be shrunk. They wouldn't have as much independence in their life if they didn't use technology.'

Catherine Payne - St Giles School

How do we use LGfL resources to support our learners? 

'So with BusyThings we will sit with our students and give them the confidence and maybe we'll even model it so it's both of us working together. They then eventually will get the confidence and they will work on their own. BusyThings are tailor made so you can actually create a resource, especially for the individual child. They absolutely love BusyThings, it's absolutely great fun. So they don't even know they're learning. So it's a really, really good resource; you can use switches and joysticks and with our help, with our support, they all seem to be able to get through and independently at the end be able to use BusyThings'

Lynne Castle - St Giles School

How do we use J2e resources to support our learners? 

'We were able to use the wonderful resource of J2e and all that it offered us to access and allow our parents and our learners to see  and take part in the end of year show. We were then able to video our learners. We pretended that it was going to be like a cinematic experience and we wanted to have a safe link that we could give to our parents to allow them to watch their young people in action in the show'    

Catherine Payne. Class teacher - St Giles School