Overlay keyboards are popular form primary schools to pubs and have become increasingly sophisticated over the past few years. Here, TES reviewers find an enormous number of different ways to make the most out of the lastest developments.
Overlay keyboards seem to be taking over. They are not just in the primary classroom or giving pupils with disabilities and learning difficulties access to the curriculum; they are in pubs, banks and fast food outlets all around the country. They give a fast, accurate way of inputting data, whether it’s words, numbers, symbols or pictures. You can even use them to trigger animations and video clips.
It comes as some surprise to find staff in colleges and schools dismissing overlay keyboards as too young or inappropriate for their students. After all, those same students use them to get money from a cash dispenser or a can from a drinks machine. In fact, overlay keyboards started in the workplace, and some of the latest industrial training uses exactly the same technology.
“Anywhere there is a training activity, there is a potential use for a Concept Keyboard,” says Simon Parsonage of the Concept Keyboard Company.
Like all technologies, the overlay keyboard has evolved and become more sophisticated over the past few years. Many people were first introduced to the delights of the overlay keyboard with NCET’s award-winning Touch Explorer program which worked on BBCs and RM Nimbus 186s. But if your image of an overlay keyboard is a blue-edged, grey-faced board which you use to insert words or sentences in text, you are seriously out of date.
Informatrix, from Northwest Semerc and the Concept Keyboard Company, with its 4,096 active points means that you can now use very detailed pictures and allocate many more messages. You can trace a map or every item on a really busy picture and allocate messages for each object with no risk of the wrong message coming up on the screen.
With the newer, more powerful machines, virtually any program will interface with the new overlay keyboards. To make the best use of these facilities, the teacher needs to develop resources relevant to individual groups or to support particular courses. This might involve selecting sound files or developing collections of clip art which can be selected via an overlay. For this you need overlay designer software.
IntelliKeys, from IntelliTools, is an unusual product because the software is contained in the keyboard itself. You just plug the keyboard into your Apple or PC and choose an overlay from the samples. If you want to make your own overlays you need Overlay Maker, which looks more like a graphics package than the traditional overlay creator. At present it is only available for the Apple but any overlays you make can be used straightaway on a PC as well.
But what are the benefits of using an overlay keyboard in the ordinary classroom? Let’s start with text. Overlays with core vocabulary have proved very beneficial for learners with dyslexia. The students are not relying on memory or inadequate spelling skills to write unfamiliar or difficult words. Instead they are looking again and again at the correctly-spelt words on an overlay. They are subconsciously learning the correct shape and structure of the word before they form it themselves. They are also focusing on what they want to write and thinking in units of meaning instead of just focusing on the individual word or letter. As a result, they become more fluent and confident writers. In some colleges in Humberside, overlays have been used to introduce and teach French culinary terms to catering students, while college students in the north west have been building up records of achievement using overlays and ClarisWorks templates. Some centres are using symbol overlays and linking these to the new PC Writing Set program from Widgit software so that students can produce symbol-supported text.
But overlays can also be used for mathematics and number work. Many people already use them for their shape-matching activities, sequencing and number recognition but they can be used for more complex activities as well. Words, numbers and formulae can be entered into spreadsheets, and Windows Concept from the Advisory Unit: Computers in Education has examples of spreadsheets on the theme of video hire and selling food in a kebab shop.
Overlays can also be used with databases and for data collection. These can be used for schools activities such as monitoring how pupils travel to school or the different pets owned by class members or in colleges to check out food values or survey the range and types of accidents in the workplace.
A few years ago, when you showed teachers overlays covered with beautiful drawings, they used to ask: “How can I get these pictures on screen?”. The answer used to be that you couldn’t, but now the newer and more powerful machines open up a whole range of different opportunities.
Pictures, sounds, synthetic speech or digitised speech clips can now be imported via the overlay keyboard, and this seems to be where the future of overlay keyboards may lie. If learners can press a square on an overlay to set off a process, or to activate video and CD-Roms, then they can focus on what they want to do without the keyboard, menus or commands getting in the way.
The next stage for the Concept Keyboard Company is likely to be a Concept Keyboard for a Toshiba laptop which would have overlays to activate macros for Word Perfect and other business packages. Even more exciting possibilities lie ahead in the educational market.
