Designed by teachers and other professionals, SENSwitcher represents a major advance in ICT teaching resources for students with severe or profound and multiple learning difficulties, those who need to develop skills with assistive input devices and very young children starting out with computers.
The program comprises 132 different activities covering eight progressive stages in skills development ranging from purely experiential visual stimulation and tracking, through cause and effect, switch building, timed activation and simple row scanning. All of the activities can be operated by the use of either a pointing device, keyboard, switch or touch screen. The program can be run online, preloading activities to enable fast response times on a 56.6k modem. It can also be downloaded in standard 'Zip' (PC) or 'Stuffit' (MAC) format for use on standalone computers with a Macromedia Flash 5 enabled browser.
The program is accompanied by this teacher's reference document, which
details each of the sections, suggesting possible teaching activities and
including a series of charts to record assessment, progression and attainment
in line with the recently released 'P' levels of the QCA
curriculum document 'Planning, teaching and assessing the curriculum for
pupils with learning difficulties - Information and Communication Technology',
published in March 2001.
The document includes a number of case studies compiled while beta testing
the program at Priory
Woods School, an all age school for children with severe and profound
and multiple learning difficulties.
You can access the launch page by following the link from the main menus
screen.
Once loaded the page displays an illustration and short description of the
available levels. Load any section by clicking on the 'Launch' icon.
| Level
1 Patterns |
||
 |
Single
press activated cause and effect animations |
 |
You can return to the launch screen at any time by holding down the [ALT] key and pressing [F4] on the PC or [APPLE] and [W] on the Macintosh.
The program can be downloaded and used off-line or on computers without
an Internet connection. To download the program, select the appropriate
format and click the respective download link to save the zip file to the
hard disk of your computer. Unzip the file to a folder (SENSwitcher) on
your hard disk and run the program by double clicking offline_index.htm.
If you do not have an application to unzip the archive you can download
various applications to do this from here.
You can install the stand-alone version simply by downloading the five PC zip files and unzipping them onto five formatted floppy disks. Once complete, insert disk one and double click the file Setup.exe. Follow all onscreen prompts to change disks. You can run the program by locating the SENSwitcher folder on your hard disk and double clicking offline_index.htm.
You can install the stand-alone version simply by downloading the two Macintosh
sit files and copy them onto two formatted floppy disks. Extract each archive
from the floppy into the same folder on your hard disk. You can run
the program by double clicking offline_index.htm.
| ©
2001 Northern Grid for Learning |