#AppMondayTAS - Storybook Maker

Each week I will be featuring an app from BridgingApps.org.  These apps are features in the Bridging Apps newsletter each week and are reviewed by Speech Pathologists, Occupational Therapists, and Special Education Teachers.  Come back each week for a new review.  If you’d like more information on how to use the BridgingApps.org website, or to find more app reviews, please click here.

Storybook Maker - (iPad Only, $2.99)

Reviewer Comments

Storybook Maker is an app that allows the user to write, illustrate and publish their own story. Using text, photos, graphics and audio recordings, the app allows an adult or child to design their own book.

There are many uses for this app, but one we have found especially useful for children is a method for discussing upcoming changes in a schedule due to vacations or some other event that is out of the ordinary routine.

Using Storybook Maker, a caregiver can write a social story about their vacations or weekends. Using actual photos, the story can be customized for the user. Older children and adults can also use Storybook Maker to write stories about the event and then share then with family and friends.

It is a great way for the child to share their experiences with their friends and teachers when they return to school. It is also a great way to encourage written language and auditory comprehension.

We have used this app with children between the ages of 2 and 10 with diagnoses of Down syndrome, speech delay, autism spectrum disorders and anxiety.

Mobile Devices

iPad

Embedded Skills

attention span

develop joint attention

expressive language

organization

parts of a story

social interaction

social skills practice

vocabulary development

written sentence construction

multiple languages

Independent Traits

Books and Stories

Creative

Early Learning

Reading and Phonics

Assistive/Independent

Independent

iTunes Categories

Education

Books

BridgingApps Categories

BridgingApps Reviewed App

Language Arts

Social Skills

Speaking and Listening

Disclaimer:

You may copy, modify format, distribute and perform the work(s), including app reviews and any data even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission provided that you: a) cite our research project and publications as follows: BridgingApps, a program of Easter Seals Greater Houston; b) agree that we make no warranties about the work(s) or data, and disclaim liability for all uses of the work(s) or data, to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law; c) when using or citing the work(s) or data, you should not imply endorsement by us; and d) do not misrepresent the work or its content, or any part thereof, or present it any manner which would have the effect of disparaging BridgingApps, Easter Seals Greater Houston or any affiliated entity or person.

Patrick

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#AppMondayTAS - Attainment's Read to Learn

Each week I will be featuring an app from BridgingApps.org.  These apps are features in the Bridging Apps newsletter each week and are reviewed by Speech Pathologists, Occupational Therapists, and Special Education Teachers.  Come back each week for a new review.  If you’d like more information on how to use the BridgingApps.org website, or to find more app reviews, please click here.

Attainment's Read to Learn - $39.99 (iPad only)

Reviewer Comments

This app contains a library of books that addresses social and life skills. They are divided into 3 sections: Life Skills, Safety Skills and Focus on Feelings.

The app contains 85 unique stories, each with graded comprehension exercises. All text is highlighted as it is read, and the narration is very clear and easily understood. The reader can touch any word at any time to hear it pronounced. Definitions are also included with each word.

At the end of each story, comprehension exercises assess the reader’s understanding of each story. There are optional hints for the comprehension exercises. Test results are stored and can be printed. Optional automatic page reading and turning help readers who have difficulty navigating the app. The Read to Learn iPad App scans, and is accessible with one or two switches.

This app is heavily illustrated, but all illustrations are appropriate for children or adults. The stories are relevant to real life situations of most older children and adults.

We have used this app with children between the ages of 7 and 16 years old with the diagnoses of Autism spectrum disorders and ADHD. All of the children we have used this app with have enjoyed the app and willingly participated in the comprehension activities.

Mobile Devices

iPad

Embedded Skills

"wh" questions

ability to choose from multiple choices

attention span

auditory comprehension

decision-making

executive functioning skills

increase daily living skills

increase reasoning skills

problem solving

promoting independence

reading comprehnsion

social skills practice

scanning and selecting

switch use

Independent Traits

Education

Listening Skills

Problem Solving

Self Help

Social Skills

Assistive/Independent

Independent

iTunes Categories

Education

Books

BridgingApps Categories

BridgingApps Reviewed App

Foundation Skills

Life Skills

Social Skills

Disclaimer:

You may copy, modify format, distribute and perform the work(s), including app reviews and any data even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission provided that you: a) cite our research project and publications as follows: BridgingApps, a program of Easter Seals Greater Houston; b) agree that we make no warranties about the work(s) or data, and disclaim liability for all uses of the work(s) or data, to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law; c) when using or citing the work(s) or data, you should not imply endorsement by us; and d) do not misrepresent the work or its content, or any part thereof, or present it any manner which would have the effect of disparaging BridgingApps, Easter Seals Greater Houston or any affiliated entity or person.

Patrick

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Minecraft & Reading

Just a quick post this morning, I wanted to share this really interesting article about how a Mother used the game Minecraft to help her child with Asperger's learn to read.  Very informative, and a great way to use games to teach!

How Minecraft taught my 9-year old with Asperger's to read and write

Patrick

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Repeated Line & Phoneme Books

A great discussion was started on the QIAT listserv about storybooks with repeated lines.  These are great books to work on beginning literacy, easy to adapt for non-verbal students, great to use with switches and many other things.  What resulted was this list of storybooks, and links to them on Amazon

Bibliography of Books with Rhyme and Repeated Lines

Then recently this list was posted to QIAT that lists books that work on specific phonemes, it has a ton of great books on it!

Bibliography of Books for Specific Phoneme Practice

Happy Reading!

Patrick

Image courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons - ZeRo `SKiLL

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Click to Read - Aimee Solutions #spedchat #spedtech

I have written before about Aimee Solutions and love all the products they have offered.  While they continue to offer their Take and Teach Language kits, they are adding more to their catalog.  These ladies who are a technology facilitator, speech therapists and an occupational therapist in a Chicagoland special education cooperative have outdone themselves with their new offering - Click to Read!


The Click to Read series is a set of early literacy programs available for use on your computer.  Each CD contains 4 stories centered around a topic.  These stories can be read, interacted with, retold, and expanded upon with games and other materials.  They also include printable materials for you to use off-line.  The programs are written to be used with students from pre-K to high school and beyond.  They have tons of options for switch access (both automatic and step scanning), P.A.C.T. highlighting, feedback for switch access, and much more.



The programs also include several different levels for retelling from simple fill in the blank to recreating the story page by page.  The games can be set to different levels like picture matching, word to picture matching or reading words.  All games include audio prompts and corrective feedback when needed.



There are 3 different Click to Read programs to choose from:



Animal Habitats

• The Desert - Animals, birds and plants that live in the Southwest Desert
• A Home in the Forest - Animals that live in the forest and where they make their homes
• Pond Life - Animals, insects and plants found in the pond habitat; focus on prepositions "in, on, around"
• Ocean Creatures - Familiar ocean inhabitants; 1:1 correspondence through 5

All About Me

• I am Me - all about self awareness & qualities that make us unique
• How Do You Feel - Real life examples of activities & interactions that make us happy, sad, mad & excited
• Using my 5 Senses - Making Kool-Aid is used to teach students about the 5 senses
• Looking Good - personal grooming and hygiene

Life Skills

• Ben Goes Shopping - Help Ben find what store to buy items at
• Community Signs - Signs found in the community and what they mean
• What Time is it? - Time of day and common activities associated with each
• How Much is it Worth? - Introduction to money values, saving and spending

I have to say that I have used both All About Me and Life Skills with my students, and they love them. The stories have predictable phrases and engage the students from the start.  They especially enjoy retelling them.  The programs can be used on any computer, but excel on a SMART Board, Promethean, or other touch screen.  They become so much more interactive and the students really get into the stories and activities.  I highly recommend these programs!

Check out all the Take and Teach Language Kits & Click to Read programs at Aimee Solutions.

-  Patrick

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Assessing Reading Skills of Students with Special Needs @kmkenny89 #sped #spedchat

This is a guest post by Kaylyn Kenny (@kmkenny89). Kaylyn is a student at Illinois State University who is majoring in special education. I recently "met" Kaylyn on Twitter during this week's #spedchat, which was an open forum. You can view the transcript here. Kaylyn chimed right in asking, "learning about assessing students...any advice? I have to do a lot of assessing this semester." Her question generated several responses. I then asked if she would be interested in writing a guest post and she agreed.


Here at Illinois State University, as part of our courses on curriculum and instruction we have to assess and tutor students around the rural area. We first make an assessment toolkit. In the assessment toolkit, we need teacher materials, anecdotal notes, and data analysis forms.

One of the first assessments we use to assess to our students is the Burke Reading Interview, which helps us know what type of reader the student is along with how comfortable they are with reading. One of the main points of assessing is to make sure every student goes through the reading process while they are reading. First, they need to activate their schema. They can do that by sampling the text, anticipating or predicting, and monitoring their reading (Does it make sense? Does it sound right? Does it look right?). They can connect the sample to their own lives or background knowledge. Then they will either confirm or disconfirm what they have read. If they confirm, they will self correct right away. And if they disconfirm, they will search for the word or sentence then they will self correct or even skip the word.

We can also assess with the HT (hypothesis test) process. This is where teachers record and observe what the student does before, during and after a student is reading. Then we interpret why the student is doing the actions we observe and make an hypothesis with the observations and interpretations we have wrote down. The most important part is making a curricular decision for the student when we teach them. Reading is a complex process of solving and meaning.


- Kaylyn

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Unique Summer Curriculum Review

I took the opportunity this summer to try out the Unique Curriculum from the folks at News-2-You. I was impressed by the program, and felt it did a lot of things very well. There are a few parts that they could improve.

The summer theme was "Summer". We talked about going to the pool, taking walks, going camping, etc... It was a good topic for a summer session, and even included an "indoor camping" lesson to end things. I was not able to complete all the lessons (we had a short ESY session this year), but do have some thoughts on it.

Good Points:

• The theme was something that all the students could relate too. It was easy to find activities that they understood.
  
• The curriculum covers all the areas. There were lessons for reading, math, science & social science.
• Differentiation! All lessons included several different levels to help teachers plan for different level students.
  
• Available for Primary, Intermediate, Jr. High & High School levels.
• Multiple materials available. Books came in 3 levels, worksheets came with pictures or without, even tracing or non tracing sheets for handwriting.
  

Things to work on:

• The materials are all in black & white. This did not engage my students as well as other materials I've used.
  
• The lessons were in an odd order. Now this may be a misunderstanding by me, but all the reading lessons were first, then science, etc... I expected the different subjects to be scattered throughout the entire unit. Admittedly reading was prevalent in the majority of the lessons, but other subjects were more limited.
• I don't feel that there was enough core content to justify using it as a full curriculum. I can see using it for science/social science (since it has great themes), but using it as my full reading curriculum does not feel right to me.
  

These are just my thoughts on the free Summer Curriculum from Unique Learning Systems. Did you use the curriculum this summer? or do you use Unique Learning System during the year? I'd love to hear your thoughts

Patrick

Photo Courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons: Xose Castro

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GameGoo

Annemarie, from SMARTBoards & More, shared another great site. GameGoo is a fun site for teaching literacy skills. It's fun, easy to use, and would work great on a SMARTBoard!

Patrick

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FREE Unique Learning Summer Curriculum

Readers of this blog might remember that I've talked about News-2-You before. They also have a curriculum called the Unique Learning System. The Unique Learning System is a thematic curriculum with reading, math, science & social science standards built into it. They have included multiple bands, i.e. grade levels, to facilitate teaching multiple groups of students. And they are giving away their summer curriculum for free! You can download the free curriculum from here:

Summer Curriculum

Patrick

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UPDATE - E-Text Resource List

I've update my post about E-text resources. The list has been moved online to a wiki, which will be update more often. Take a look at the list here:

E-Text Resource List

Patrick

E-book Resource List

A QIAT listerve member - Dinell Stuckey - recently posted a list of E-Book resources. This list includes many websites that have free and subscription books. The books are available in e-text, audio files, intellitools, Boardmaker, flash and other formats. You can download a copy of the list here:

E-Text Resource List

Patrick

Stories in a New York Minute

A elementary classroom needs to have 1500 books in it to be considered a well stocked library.
Caroline Musselwhite

I don't remember exactly where Caroline got this information, but in looking around I don't know of many classrooms that have 1500 books. One way to increase the number of books in a classroom is by writing them yourself. Caroline recommends taking a topic and writing 4 quick stories - a noun story, verb story, adjective story, & preposition story. The books should be supported by photos or illustrations. Books can then be used to support a theme or topic of the month. Here's a link to the original information posted by Caroline Musselwhite:


Stories in a New York Minute

Teaching All Learners

One blog that I have come across recently, is Teaching Learners with Multiple Special Needs. It is written by another special education teacher, Kate Ahern, from Massachusetts. I have not gotten through all the posts, but there is so much information. This blog touches on so many different aspects of teaching children and is a great resource for all educators and parents.

Beginning Literacy

Earlier this year, I attended a workshop by Caroline Musselwhite. Other than being an absolutely engaging presenter, I learned quite a lot. One of her main points was that all students (with or without significant cognitive disabilities) need three types of reading materials - Enrichment, Transitional, & Conventional. Here's a .pdf that talks about the process of creating and using these types of books. The chart at the end of the file:

Beginning Literacy Framework

This was created by Caroline along with several other people at Don Johnson. Check out Caroline's site AAC Intervention. She has monthly tips on how to get more literacy into your day.

Literacy for All

Teaching reading to all students has been something on my mind for quite a while.  While at my last district I was part of a team that investigated different curriculum's to teach reading to all students.  One curriculum that impressed me greatly was the Early Literacy Skills Builder, from Attainment Company.  It was created by Dr. Diane Browder from University of North Carolina and her staff.  Several years ago she began looking for reading programs for students with disabilities that met the National Reading Panels recommendations, but was unable to find anything that met all the recommendations.  She decided to create a reading curriculum to use with students with significant cognitive disabilities.


The research for this program was started several years ago, and is part of a 5 year research study.  Dr. Browder is in year 3 of this study, and so far all students who have participated have made significant gains.  Here is a white paper about the research: White Paper.

The program is designed as a Direct Instruction type program. It is scripted and includes most of the necessary materials to teach the program.  Sight words, phonemic awareness, and direct phonics instruction are part of the program.  Comprehension and vocabulary are covered by using storybooks.  There are 10 steps to using the storybooks to work on these skills.

This program is literally the only program available that has been researched, and shown significant results for students with significant cognitive disabilities.  It is a great program.




-  Patrick

Tar Heel Reader

Recently, on the QIAT list (a group of professionals who discuss Assistive Technology), a new web resource was introduced. The resource is called Tar Heel Reader.  This is a simple to use service which allows you to create eBooks in minutes.  The pictures are from the photo site Flickr.com.  The books can be looked at online, or downloaded to powerpoint or a Adobe flash player.   If you read the book online you can have it read by 3 different voices.  Over 180 books are already available online in a variety of topics.  Check it out and start creating!!


BTW - There is a code you will need to join and start writing books (to keep out the spammers). If you are interested, please leave me a comment and I'll give you the code.


Thank you to Samuel Sennott for sharing this information with all of us.