Books, booklets & multimedia

SpeakEasy CD Rom

	Price: £64.00 (+£11.20 VAT)	Information Plus, 2004
	System Requirements: Windows 98 and higher PowerPC or higher Macintosh computers Sound card, 16 bit colour and CDROM.

Listening to and involving children is central to the planning and review process for looked after children and a key theme in fostering and adoption standards. The Children Act requires that children’s wishes and feelings are taken into account when planning their care. Despite clear legal requirements however, children often feel uninvolved in the major decisions relating to their lives.

Uncertainty about the future remains a major worry for children not able to live with birth families. On the other hand, efforts to involve children in future planning can be difficult. For many young people, attending a review and speaking up in front of adults may be more than they can cope with. Similarly a written report may not feel like a natural way of expressing how you think and feel.

SpeakEasy provides an exciting, relevant and engaging framework to enable children and young people to participate in their reviews through an interactive computer programme. Using a popular mix of fill in fields and interactive activities Speakeasy's 6 thematic sections cover all the key issues reviews will need to consider to take account of young people’s views. Substantial use of voice clips means that reading skills are no barrier to using the programme.

As well as gathering a young person’s own information and views, SpeakEasy contains a wealth of information young people need in order to understand the what’s going on and get help and advice. Each section has a printable “About” topic and a number of interactive activities are devoted to helping answer young people’s questions about care, education, health, contact and the meaning of terms used by social workers and other professionals. Output takes a number of different forms for different purposes. Firstly, all screens can be printed in full A4 landscape format for young people to keep as a record of what they have said in the programme. All data, including the position of drag and drop objects, can also be saved to a data file either on a hard disc or floppy disc for loading in again at a later date. This would be particularly useful prior to a subsequent review as an easy way of reviewing how a young person had felt at the time of their last review. All the information entered can also be printed in a compact report summarising everything entered in the programme in a form that would be useful to the review. This report prints section by section so that any number of copies of any particular section can be printed. The “look and feel” of the programme is closely related to that of “My Life Story” (an interactive resource for life story work) also from Information Plus, so if children and practitioners have already used My Life Story, then SpeakEasy will follow on very naturally.

In addition to over 100 fill in fields and dozens of interactive activities and animations, SpeakEasy comes with a useful contact manager, 2 health quizzes, a noughts and crosses game, over 20 pages of printable worksheets and detailed professional help for every section.

Sections and themes

The six key sections of SpeakEasy are:

SpeakEasy is also designed to be visually attracted, relevant and fun to use, full of images, ideas and approaches young people enjoy. It can make a major contribution to helping young people express their views and feelings and begin to take control of their lives - truly the interactive way of saying what you think and feel.