Clicker 8

 I checked out the trial for the Clicker 8 application on my Mac. This app is great for helping students with creating sentences but there are also features that help to create word banks. There are some sample sets the help get you started but it was pretty simple to create your own sentence builders and connected sentence builder sets. I created two sets that can be accessed in one document that me or a student is working on. 

It is was simple to click on the word buttons to create a sentence and then it read it back to you. This is great because students still get the opportunity to check if their sentence makes sense. I was even able to add pictures to match the sentences available for writing. I found mine from and image search but it would be possible to connect your work with Boardmaker and insert images from there into Clicker. Here is a video of what it looked like writing a sentence with the sentence set.

I was then able to add another set to my writing document. I made a connected set. I followed the same themes as the sentence set however there were more options and the addition of "and."

Not only is a student able to create sentences with the the templates provided, but if there is a word not available they can type the word in. There is also an option to create a word bank for students to access when writing. Also, the support option provides predictive writing to helps students create their own sentences.

In the end, I was able to create a short paragraph that stayed on topic of the general theme. Here is a video of the final creation.

Overall, Clicker 8 is a great tool to help students struggle to create meaningful writing produce work independently. I wish I had had access to this app at the beginning of the year as I was trying to help my student reach their writing goal of producing simple sentences independently. While it does require a bit of prep work, when you have all the content you want available it is pretty simple to put it all together. It is also a very user friendly app when writing, most students would require very little pre-teaching in order to use this program. This makes it very easy for students to adopt and add to their toolbox.