John lives on site at The Meath and while he enjoys the variety of activities on offer at our dedicated Skills Centre, he has a natural leaning towards and interest in IT. He is fascinated by how things work and has huge capacity for finding out more about topics of interest, having spoken to John it is apparent that using the Skills Centre IT suite is a huge source of life enrichment. While John is happy to celebrate success made at the gym, he gains much of his sense of purpose and achievement from his progress in IT sessions which combine research, literacy, communication, design, and IT skills. The process of working on these projects helps him to maintain cognitive function, while typing helps to maintain his fine motor skills. John uses standard equipment and Microsoft word. He can work from a regular keyboard and screen; we support clients with a broad range of abilities and needs and many of our less able users require larger keyboards to work from in addition to specialist software, for clients who are visually impaired.
John has carefully and methodically been supported to produce three detailed research ‘how it works’ topic books on subjects of his choosing, these are: the Honda Car, the Television and the Denis bus (both motorised and electric). John’s research was enhanced by visits to Brooklands transport museum (home to the national bus museum) and even a trip to PC world is a source of great fascination and information for him.
The pandemic and many lockdowns have been an especially challenging time for many of the people we support and for John, having access to the IT suite was a huge factor in him maintaining good mental health during lockdowns. John has achieved much of his latest research book during lockdown periods and it gave him drive and focus during a difficult time.
John is extremely grateful to have easy access to the equipment on site and his two IT sessions are always the highlight of his week. He has set his sights on a new project book about The Hovercraft and plans on taking the Hovercraft on a day trip to the Isle of Wight for some field trip research. As John is also a keen and skilled photographer, he hopes to use some of his own photography in his next project. One of his learning objectives is also to use IT to prepare some presentations about his research topics; here IT will be utilised to enable John to improve in communication and presentation skills which is are areas that he feels less confident in.
Now that the IT sessions take place outside of lockdown, Activity Leader Rachel hopes to introduce some video editing software to enable the group to create their own short videos which explain and celebrate the progress they have made in IT or other sessions.
Article meta data
Clicking on any of the links in this section will take you to other articles that have been tagged in the same category.
- This article was written by the The Meath Karten Centre
- Featured in the Karten Autumn 2021 Newsletter
- This article is listed in the following subject areas: Case Study, Centre News