It is Saturday, and I know that there are hundreds of teachers online, searching for social story resources for their students who have autism spectrum disorders or other disabilities that interfere with social interaction and communication skills.
I am putting up a link to a mega-list of social story links. If you scroll down the massive page, you will find social stories and additional links. I have not explored the site or evaluated any of the stories. I plan to choose some of the best that I find, and link them from this blog
Readers are welcome to post links to good social stories and social stories resources in the comment section. This is NOT the spot for commercially-made social stories, as those can be found elsewhere.
Here is the link. From the title, it looks like it was a "test" page, so perhaps there is a cleaned-up version elsewhere.
http://www.autism-pdd.net/testdump/test14154.htm
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Social Stories: Link to the ultimate Social Stories resource (test) site!
Friday, September 11, 2009
Ru Zarin's Interactive Multi-touch Applications for the Cognitively Disabled: Social stories, talking symbols, a piano, and more!
Trollskogen Final Demo from Ru Zarin on Vimeo.
The above video is a demonstration of Ru Zarin's masters degree project at Umea Universitet.
This project examined ways to use multi-touch technologies to support communication and learning among children with Down syndrome, autism, and related diagnoses within the age group of 5-8. I especially liked the animated social story application.
"Trollskogen is a communicative framework designed to enhance communication among people with cognitive disabilities. The forest is split up into interactive modules that provide a fun and engaging learning environment while helping improve on certain aspects of speech, reading/writing and symbol based languages. This framework has been deployed on a custom multi-touch table prototype built at the Interactive institute Umeå, enabling the children to interact with their fingers in a more natural, intuitive way rather than a traditional keyboard/mouse setup."
RELATED READING
RELATED VIDEOS OF THE PROJECT DEVELOPMENT
Ru collaborated with the illustrator Linda Arvidsson for the characters and objects found in the troll forest theme.
I especially liked the Troll Forest Cabin, which is shown in the social stories section of the video.
Cross posted on the Interactive Multimedia Technology blog.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
Eric Sailers' Speech and Language Blog & Website: Exploring New Interactive Technologies
Eric Sailers, M.A., CCC-SLP, is a speech and language pathologist and assisted technology specialist in La Mesa, California. Eric has a great webiste, Speech and Language Pathology Sharing, and a very accessible, icon based navigation system on his website at Parkway Middle School.
Like me, Eric is a fan of Johnny Chung Lee. If you haven't heard of Johnny Chung Lee, you need to know that along the way to earning his Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie-Mellon, he explored various ways to hack the Wii and WiiMotes. His YouTube video, "Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard Using the Wiimote" went viral, and over the past year, it recieved over two million hits.
(Johnny's work was the inspiration for one of my previous blog posts, "I wish I could be Johnny Chung Lee for a day!")
At any rate, here is Eric Sailers' "how-to" video that explains how to create a low-cost system appropriate for use in the schools:
The purpose of Eric's blog "...is to share speech-language materials. Some example materials will include computer books, communication boards, and social language videos."
His blog is well worth visiting if you work with students with special needs.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Therapeutic use of digital and multimedia storytelling and social stories for children and teens: Link
Take a look at a recent post on the Interactive Multimedia Technology blog:
Resources for the (therapeutic) use of digital and multimedia storytelling and social stories for children and teens...
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Video Modeling Software for visual learners, including those with autism spectrum disorders.
Here is a clip about the Activity Trainer, video modeling software that supports the following skills:
- Academic
- Communication
- Daily Living
- Non-Verbal Imitation
- Recreation
- Social
- Vocational
A free 30-day trial of the software can be downloaded from the Accelerations Educational Software website.
On the Accelerations Educational Software website, you can find other products, such as Storymovies, which is the product of a collaboration between Carol Gray (social stories), Mark Shelley, and the Special Minds Foundation.
