Learning Support

iPad is an integral tool that we use with our SEND students. It allows us to send lesson PowerPoints to students via Google Classroom so that they do not have to constantly look from their desks up at the board, and then back to their books. We send them worksheets that they can use to mark-up on to add their answers or annotate. The impact of this is that students can have important information right in front of them, which is beneficial for those with processing and working memory difficulties. A further impact is that it cuts down on the amount of writing that they may need to do, enabling students to show their knowledge and understanding by working around any barriers to learning that they may have.

Using their iPads enables our SEND students to complete research tasks within lessons and at home, such as learning more about the lives of Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde. This positively impacts on learning, because students can independently build on their knowledge and understanding of topics, to move their learning forward. Using their iPads in this way helps to increase their motivation and engagement and enables them to access a wealth of information online to support their studies. Linked to this, students can also collaborate with each other as they can share documents or Airdrop work to each other. Collaboration also impacts positively on the students’ engagement and motivation, and this is facilitated by using iPads in lessons.

The iPads allow the students to access new vocabulary by asking Siri. Often, when we introduce specific vocabulary for our topics, the students will race to see who can find the definition on their iPads first. By using Google Sheets, students can create their own personal dictionary where they can add their new vocabulary. The impact of students having constant access to a tool whereby they can look up new vocabulary definitions and build up their own store of useful words, is that they can incorporate new vocabulary into their writing and develop their reading comprehension of increasingly complex texts.

There are many different apps we use such as Keynote, which allows the student to verbally record their ideas on to a presentational tool, or the teacher can record verbal instructions which the students can listen to as they work through the tasks. This helps those students who can verbalise their ideas but then struggle to write them down, as the student can speak their ideas and the app will then type them out into text. We also encourage our students to use their iPad as an e-reader: by enabling the ‘speak’ function, they can highlight any text they need reading out and the iPad will read it out loud to them. This supports any students with reading difficulties, impacting on their ability to gain meaning from texts in lessons, at home and when completing assessments and exams.

The iPad helps us check the students’ understanding as we can use apps like Socrative where we can create a quiz based on the topic we are learning and it records each student's answers, giving us an idea of their strengths and weaknesses. It allows us to do an exit quiz at the end of the lesson where we can ask a question relevant to the learning and we can gauge the students' understanding.

The iPad helps us to model the writing process to SEND students, through using the ‘screen mirroring’ function and an Apple pencil. The impact of this is that the teacher (an expert writer) can make explicit the writing process, from planning, to composition, to proof-reading, to redrafting. This is a powerful way to help SEND students develop their writing skills and enable them to make progress.