The Additional Support Needs (ASN) Outreach Service consists of experienced staff working in a range of teams, to support children and young people with additional support needs. One of these is the ICT Teacher.
The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Teacher
The ICT Outreach teacher has knowledge and experience of working with children and young people from 0 – 18 years, who have additional support needs that may be supported using ICT.
An ASN Co-ordinator manages the work of this teacher and may be contacted for further information or any ICT discussion.
Who does Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Teacher the work with?
The ICT Outreach teacher works in partnership with pupils, school staff, parents/carers and other agencies to support children and young people’s learning through using ICT hardware and software.
Requests can be made for support from the ICT Teacher, if appropriate, following discussion with the team around the child. The decision to request support is made at a Staged Intervention meeting. If the request is appropriate, the ICT Outreach teacher
will join the existing team around the child in planning appropriate support. Other requests for support that do not involve direct work with a child or young person can also be made.
The support planned will involve a team of people working together. This will include:
• The child/young person
• Parents/carers
• Class teacher
• Support for Learning teacher
It may include:
• Speech & Language Therapist
• Educational Psychologist
• Occupational Therapist
• Physiotherapist
• Other outside agencies (e.g. CALL Scotland)
What will the Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
Teacher do?
The support planned might involve the teacher in a variety of different ways, which may include:
• Building capacity of school staff to support pupils with ASN
• Demonstrating hardware and software solutions to pupils, parents and school staff
• Meeting parents in school or on home-visits
• Observing children/young people in various school settings to plan
support
• Consulting and working with teachers and support staff in school
• Working with children/young people in a small group or individually
• Liaising with other agencies
• Offering training in ASN ICT support to schools
• Attending meetings and contributing to Individual
Educational Programmes (IEPs) as necessary
• Joint assessments with Support for Learning and/or other agencies
What might support from the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Teacher look like?
Stirling Council schools are well resourced with computers
in or near classrooms. However, some pupils would benefit
from using a portable computer at their table in class. The ICT outreach teacher might also recommend that pupils use alternative keyboards and mice or switches to control computer functions.
- Hardware may be borrowed by the school for a few weeks to allow the pupils to try the equipment out in school.
- Recommending the use of text to speech applications to support reading of documents, web pages etc.
- Recommend the use of text prediction programs to help reduce the number of keystrokes needed to type a word. The
program predicts what word might come next and can make
sense of spelling mistakes. - Pupils with a visual impairment or a disability which prevents them from holding a book or turning the pages in a book or dyslexic difficulties may benefit from using a digital copy of a book. These can include talking books.
- Supporting pupils to prepare to sit SQA examinations by using computers rather than using a reader or a scribe.
