St Lucy's School

A community enriched by difference

Enhanced Technology – for students with disabilities

At St Lucy’s School we understand that all of our students have different requirements for learning. Our purpose built classrooms utilise a number of technologies to provide students with special needs the best educational experience, including:

• Interactive Boards – offer multiple ways to teach and interact with students. It offers students with disabilities multiple ways to learn material, express their ideas and demonstrate their understanding. The boards also allow the use of web-based applications specifically aligned to the curriculum and different stages of learning, which enhance engagement with our students and allow them to display learning in multiple ways and across a variety of different platforms.

• Classroom Assistive Listening Systems – used to enhance the reach and effectiveness of hearing aids and cochlear implants with transmission technology

• Sound Field Systems – utilises microphone and speaker technology allowing sound to travel evenly around the classroom, eliminating problems of distance between the speaker and listener.

• Adaptive computing – allows digital devices to bypass challenging tasks, we utilise screen reader applications and braille keyboards – allowing our visually impaired students to use the computers more easily

• Augmentative and Alternative Communication – allows our students who are non-verbal or have difficulties communicating overcome communication barriers using systems with visuals, voice output and computers that use word prediction functions.

• Text to Speech Assistive tools – assist students with disabilities that mean they have difficulties reading text, including blindness, dyslexia, vision impairment or learning disability. Alternative / digital pencils are also used for students who have trouble with handwriting.

• Human speech recognition software – for students with disabilities that do not allow handwritten text, we can avoid the necessity of paper and pens.

• Beebots and Dash Robots which model and teach block coding which can be integrated across multiple key learning areas and across all stages of learning.

• Some classes utilise Augmented reality education applications aligned to literacy and numeracy.

“My child has made great progress in literacy and social/behavioural gains.”

Parent

St Lucy’s ~ Technology Video