Read&Write has opened up the curriculum for every learner at St John’s Catholic School, supporting students with identified learning needs and the wider student population to learn in ways that suit them best.
- System-wide adoption across age groups (4-11 years old)
- Multi-device deployment across iPads and Chromebooks
St John’s Catholic School is a primary school located in Richmond, Tasmania. It has a student population of 350.
Read&WriteRead&Write lets us help all students at an affordable price point.”
Background
St John’s Catholic School in Richmond, Tasmania is a Kindergarten to Year Six school with a student population of 350. It has been educating students in the Catholic tradition for over 175 years.
Students at St John’s have access to a range of devices divided by age group. The youngest students use iPads (one for every two students), while each student in grades 3 to 6 has access to a Chromebook that remains in school at the end of the day.
Jacinta Keenan is an Early Years and STEM teacher at St John’s. She explains what the school was looking for when seeking EdTech tools: “Based on recommendations from psychologists, we have seen an increase in students needing assistive technology. We wanted a solution that would give children entry to the tasks, something that could stop a science lesson from becoming a literacy lesson. We wanted children to be able to document their learning using a variety of tools such as voice typing, predictive text or any of the other tools.”
St John’s specified that these tools should be available to students as and when they need them. Jacinta continued: “We were looking for a product that could be used on any device at any time. In the past I have used standalone apps that were expensive because they weren’t subscription based. Because of the cost we could only have it on a few iPads.”
This was not a problem with Read&Write. “Read&Write lets us help all students at an affordable price point,” says Jacinta. St John’s made Read&Write available to every student, not just those with a learning need. “We’ve taken the approach that it will help every student in some way,” says Jacinta.
Getting started
When it comes to implementing Read&Write, Jacinta has some tips for other schools.
“A key point for us at St John’s is that I’ve been able to support implementation. I ran introductory sessions with the students and we've used a lot of Read&Write resources. We like the really short videos on how to use each button in the toolbar. So I'd show the students some key tools, then I'd post the PDF resources with the video links to their Google Classroom, and the kids could go back and explore that later.”
“My advice to anyone implementing it in their school is to really give the teachers support. You can help by getting involved, showing the students the tools – even if it’s just a couple of features at a time.”
“I started with predictive text and using the dictionary function in Google Docs. Then a few weeks later we looked at how to simplify a webpage or have a page read aloud. Then we looked at audio notes. So we broke it down into manageable steps. Use all the resources that are available to you from Everway, they really help!”
Seeing results
Since using Read&Write we're starting to see an improvement in our literacy rates."
So far they are seeing students use the toolbar in lots of different ways. They don’t use it if they don’t need to, but can dip in and out as they work.
Jacinta tells us more: “It's helping us to embed technology in the classroom. It's empowering students to know they can complete tasks in line with other students in the classroom. They just access tools to help them complete the tasks in a way that's more appropriate for them.”
Jacinta goes on to say: “Since using Read&Write we're starting to see an improvement in our literacy rates. Even when students are using something like the predictive text on the keyboard, they have to sound out the word a little bit and then they're beginning to recognize those words.”
“Having text read back to them while following along is helping with literacy skills. It's a great tool for editing but it's different to how we would traditionally teach editing skills. As a result, there’s less reluctance from the students to have a go and complete writing tasks as well.”
Lasting impact
The teachers at St John’s have worked with students, empowering them to help themselves. They have allowed the students the independence to decide when they need to use the tools and when they don’t, without having to ask for permission. Jacinta finishes by saying, “The only thing we’ve found that Read&Write doesn’t know is how to spell the names of Pokemon characters - but who does?”
