Making ICT more accessible for younger children

[CHR1S]

I would love to hear your ideas of how you have changed, improved or not as the case may be, you ICT for nursery (4 years) and up in a primary environment.

 

I want to retain the base skills, mouse and keyboard control etc but give it a new slant.

 

We have the usual PC whiteboard combo, inspire me

[HodgeHi]

We use Tux Paint to allow them to draw and colour pictures. I have also created resources for sorting shapes and other things. Sometimes things can be a little difficult for them but mostly they manage it fine.

 

If you use windows, there's tux type which is a game where you find the letters on the keyboard before the fish gets to the bottom of the screen and there is also tux maths that lets the user develop their number skills as well as numerical keyboard skills. They both get more difficult as you get better.

 

I say if you use windows as the Tux Type isn't too great on OS X, I assume it would be good on a linux based system too.

 

Tux paint is also handy if you wish to do images based on certain topics. It has stamps installed as well as the ability to add your own line drawings. These are particularly good as when the little ones a re colouring the outlines remain. I drew a line drawing of a superhero, imported it and they coloured it in and put a face on it!

 

Then theres CBeebies. Its a good resource which most of them would be familiar with and probably used before. A good starting point.

[pooley]

We have a couple of usb drawing tablets attached to our nursery pc's to allow the children to "draw" more easily using the sylus as apposed to using a mouse. Apart from going down the route of "touch devices" i.e. ipads etc there's not much else we use here. One ingenius thing i've seen (and im esily impressed lol) the nursery staff stick a little bit of velcro on the left click button of the mouse, so children get used to where the left click is.

[CHR1S]

The stylus idea is good, do they not find it difficult to grasp the pad to screen difference?

[Alis_Klar]

We have a couple of usb drawing tablets attached to our nursery pc's to allow the children to "draw" more easily using the sylus as apposed to using a mouse. Apart from going down the route of "touch devices" i.e. ipads etc there's not much else we use here. One ingenius thing i've seen (and im esily impressed lol) the nursery staff stick a little bit of velcro on the left click button of the mouse, so children get used to where the left click is.

 

The Velcro idea is GENIUS!!

 

Have been struggling to find a colour coded mouse that does not beak after 2 weeks use by EYFS and had a quality sensor. Also shortage of quality colour coded keyboards that don't feel like they're made of thin cardboard. The TTS ones are dire!!! why is is so difficult for them to get this right!! RM used to do a quality colour coded keyboard but don't sell them any more and just refer you to TTS. ARGH!

 

Will just use a decent Logitech mouse with velcro on the left click now!! Biggest problem is the tiny ones all naturally try to click the scroll wheel and all the children's mice have a scroll wheel too!!

[andy_b]

The Velcro idea is GENIUS!!

 

Have been struggling to find a colour coded mouse that does not beak after 2 weeks use by EYFS and had a quality sensor. Also shortage of quality colour coded keyboards that don't feel like they're made of thin cardboard. The TTS ones are dire!!! why is is so difficult for them to get this right!! RM used to do a quality colour coded keyboard but don't sell them any more and just refer you to TTS. ARGH!

 

Will just use a decent Logitech mouse with velcro on the left click now!! Biggest problem is the tiny ones all naturally try to click the scroll wheel and all the children's mice have a scroll wheel too!!

 

One solution we have used to get around the right mouse / wheel mouse problem is to create an autohotkey script that either remaps the clicks or just does nothing - effectively disabling them. The teacher just runs the exe when they want to disable the wheel.

[Rob_D]

The velcro thing it a good idea.

One of the cool things my last place had was an EYFS keyboard. Oversized keys and lower case keycaps being the main selling point. (Not sure where it came from, but TTFS have similar ones)

Also we used to set the DPI scaling a bit higher on the reception computers to make it more "child friendly"