The use of symbols is a vital tool within Additional Needs, especially for staff working people with communication difficulties.

The Mulberry Symbols are is a set of free symbols – over 500 of them, which have been really well designed. They are particularly good for food in Britain. The commonly used PCS symbols clearly reflect US eating habits, not of which are common here. It’s good on clothes, household technology and some tools.

This is an excellent free resource. They are well worth downloading from here;

http://straight-street.com/

They are .wmf format and the .png formats; vector drawings, so you do NOT get blocky pixels if you enlarge them. They are available in colour and as black outlines. They are highly recommended.

Boardmaker is a staple piece of software in setting for learners with very significant communication difficulties.

It is not a piece of software for pupils to use. Rather it is a means to create, easily, communication boards and other symbol communication material including the ever useful visual timetables. You can go further and use the symbols as labels and signs in the school environment, making the school more accessible to symbol users.

Effectively Boardmaker delivers an easy way of creating these materials using Picture Communication (PCS) symbols. These are the commonly used symbols which are mistakenly called Boardmaker symbols. Boardmaker is popular because of its ease of use. The symbols can be called up by typing in the word you need.

Boardmaker 5 is no longer available. The new version 6 is apparently very similar. The main improvement is that you can type phrases or sentences, which will be represented by symbols. It is unclear, at the moment, whether this version will work on networked computers, in the way that we have managed to get BM5 working. Boardmaker has the severest form of copyright protection. You have to have the disc in the drive to use the software. This renders it liable to damage and it would have to be replaced -not at full price- from the supplier.

Note that the PCS symbols can be purchased in another form. They are available as a a CD-ROM of .wmf file – vector art for PCs. They work with MS Publisher and Word, Textease and all major packages. It is possible to create materials in more versatile ways. However, for speed of creation, Boardmaker is faster. It does what it does well.

Take a look here at some uses of Boardmaker; http://www.flickr.com/photos/ictsan/sets/72157600007125658/

Symbols are a basic tool for staff working with pupils with communication difficulties.
- labels
- a means of communicating sequnces including activities that make up a school day
- an alternative to literacy
- support for literacy
- a means of producing games and activities
- a medium for delivering a Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS)

A good guide to all the currently used sets of symbols and picures for use in communication can be found here- the CALL Centre, Edinburgh University.
Some examples of on-screen materials (printable) for communication can be found at www.symbolworld.org/

Here are some examples of PCS symbols – often known as Boardmaker symbols

I’ve put some pictures of PCS symbols in use in an ictsan flickr gallery-www.flickr.com/photos/ictsan