Category: Parent-friendly Commtap

The Communication Consortium grants programme has awarded us a grant to develop the Commtap communication resources site for parents and carers of children with communication difficulties.

We will:

• Make the site mobile friendly – so that parents/cares can easily use it on smartphones
• Add 400+ new communication activity and strategy ideas for parents/carers to use with their children
• Create 20 videos demonstrating key strategy and activity ideas
• Work with parents to ensure the site meets their needs

Why we are doing it

The existing Commtap resources site has over 1000 activity and strategy ideas on it for supporting and developing communication. These ideas have a simple structure and are quick and easy to use. However, many of them are designed for teaching staff in schools to use:

• they are matched to scales used in education
• they use materials that schools typically have (so additional expenditure is not usually necessary)

The project will extend the site to better include families of children with communication difficulties. We will:

• create a parent-friendly scale for finding the ideas
• adapt and create more ideas to use at home
• keep the same simple-to-use format as for the existing ideas
• update the site so people can view it properly on smartphones as this is how many people outside of education will view the site

We will design the ideas for parents/carers to access with or without help from a speech and language therapist or other communication specialist.

We will add a spread of ideas across communication levels and types. The activities will include ideas for language comprehension, expressive language, speech, and social skills.

Timeline

What we have done already

• Created the overall plan for the project
• Secured funding
• Recruited a speech and language therapist to write the new activity/strategy ideas
• Developed the specification for the mobile design of the site and engaged a software developer to do the work

What we are doing now

• Beginning to write the new activities ideas

What we are doing next

• Create the new mobile version of the site (eary 2021)
• Engage a group of parents/carers of children with communication difficulties to help inform development of the site (early 2021)
• Continue writing new activity/strategy ideas

Find out more

If you would like to find out more about the project, please drop us a line.

As part of our project to make the Commtap resources site more accessible to parents of children with communication difficulties, we are developing the site to make it work well on mobile phones.

Here we show you what the new mobile version of the site could look like. This is how the site would appear on small screens, we are not changing the site for larger screens such as desktops and laptops.

Have a look through, and please do send us your comments (positive as well as negative please!)

Home page

Every page will have a new bar at the top with links to the home page, login, favourite a page (heart icon), search, and menu (three lines you tap on to get the menu).

Search

If you tap on the search icon, the search box will be shown:

Search results

The search results will look like this:

You will be able to scroll down the list of results. You will be able to choose a particular section of the site to search in, or the whole site.

Tap on the “Quick start” link to get to a list of resources quickly

You can select the age range, the type of thing you are looking for, and an alternative scale.

Example of a list of activities

An example of a list of supporting resources

An activities sheet

You can change the scale by tapping on “Categorisation”. You can find other activities sheets and resources in the same section (Primary in this example) by tapping on “Guided search”. Tap on the heart icon to add the page to your list of favourites (if you are logged in).

Hamburger menu

When you tap on the “hamburger” icon (three lines at the top right of the screen), you will get a list of links:

What do you think?

Send us your comments