Kingscliff TAFE Design students Roxy Coppen and Kelly Muir won first and second place respectively in the campus Read&Write Gold poster competition. For their efforts Roxy received an iPad2 and Kelly an iPod touch.

As part of North Coast TAFE’s commitment to providing personalised vocational education and training opportunities to their students, the institute has installed the inclusive literacy and learning support software TextHelp Read&Write Gold software on all computers at the Kingscliff and Murwillumbah campuses.

Read&Write Gold software operates as a simple to use toolbar that “floats” on top of any open Windows application. Assistance can then be called upon easily as students work. It includes features such as text-to-speech - with Australian voices, speaking dictionary, inbuilt OCR (optical character recognition), word prediction, language translation support, research support and creation of audio files from text, just to name a few features.

Anita Raftery, Disabilities Consultant Tweed TAFE campuses said; “these features mean that the software provides support to all users, regardless of ability level. Students who have a learning difficulty, students who have a range of disabilities, students from a language background other than English and students who have low literacy levels can all easily access this software”.

To raise awareness of the availability of the software a student poster competition was held. TAFE students were invited to follow a design brief and create an eye catching poster.

Kelly Muir saw the Read&Write poster competition as not only a chance to be creative but also as an educational opportunity. “During the research process I got to learn about the software and how beneficial it is for its intended audience. With the new posters up and around the campus, I’m confident it will prompt Kingscliff and Murwillumbah TAFE students to take full advantage of the Read&Write Gold’s benefits”, Kelly said.