After another challenging year for specialist educators and within Show Me itself, we are more determined than ever to accelerate our activities in the New Year to introduce a neuro-scientific approach to the use of touchscreens in SEND education.
We have been planning ahead and the following provides an outline of some of our key objectives:
1. Incorporate a neuro-scientific approach:
Building upon the pioneering work of Tomás Ortiz, we have developed an introduction to "A NEURO-EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMME FOR BRAIN DEVELOPMENT" suitable for anyone working in SEND education. We will arrange a series of free webinars in the New Year for anyone interested in understanding the key principles when applied to education, followed by a recommended "bottom up" approach to their introduction in the classroom. Called HERVAT, this programme can be introduced anywhere with no cost.
In addition, we are developing research projects to run within UK SEND schools as follows:
"Brain Training" - with a select group of SEND pupils, build a daily app-based, personalised activity programme. Each participating child will have periodic EEG brain monitoring to plot development and adapt the programme to their specific brain behaviour and needs. This has been done with children with ASD in an academic setting, but we now aim to incorporate it into a SEND school setting as part of Show Me's longer term objectives.
HERVAT - building upon similar studies completed in Spain in both mainstream and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) based classrooms, informal and formal research projects to measure the impact of HERVAT over several school terms on educational outcomes for pupils.
We are developing the research project plans and budgets to begin the above projects and will contact relevant pioneer schools about possible involvement. If you would like to find out more or take part, please get in touch.
2. Deepen and widen our Pioneer Programme:
We intend to re-energise our programme with the existing 12 participating schools and extend it to new schools and app providers. This will start with the webinars detailed in the 1st point above, followed by regular group calls to coordinate activities between schools as appropriate.
We will also look to include more developer apps into the programme as well as building a SEND "progression curriculum" based approach for each. In other words, rather than specifying pre-requisites skills for each learning app as is used in mainstream education, we will place learning apps by category into an series, starting with the most simple, so that pupils can move to the next stage when they show they're able to complete the previous one.
3. Build our team:
In order to deliver the above, we aim to recruit our first full and part-time staff, focusing initially on project management, research and research grant fundraising. The team will be supported by the current Show Me team and research and project staff in Spain. If you are interested in getting involved, either full or part-time, please do get in touch.
4. Raise further funding:
We will start to focus on fundraising, particularly for the research projects and funding support staff to deliver both them and a broader pioneer programme project detailed above.
That should keep us busy for a while, and I hope to involve as many people as possible in this project to help us to help those kids in SEND education that need our help the most.
In the meantime, have a great holiday and Happy New Year!