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All right everybody. This is Jenny. I'm the graduate assistant for ICATER, and today I'm
going to talk to you a little bit about an App called Autismate. I really like this App.
I've worked with a couple of students with autism using this App and I'm here to show
you a little bit about what it does. You can get this App at the App Store for about $150.00
and I think an Autismate Lite might be coming out, but I don't have access to that one right
now, so I'm not sure about that. But Autismate has a number of different -- why isn't it
working? Maybe I won't talk about the -- let's start over now. Should I start on the info
of the App?
Hi everybody, this is Jenny. I'm the iCare graduate assistant and I'm going to talk to
you a little bit about Autismate. It's an App that retails for about $150.00. It's an
App that I've used with a number of students that I've worked with so far with Autism.
I've found it really helpful. It does a number of different things. There are a lot of different
components to it. There is a visual scheduler -- it takes you through scenes and I'll show
you what that actually means in a minute.
It has a sentence builder component to it as well. I'm going to start with the visual
scheduler. Down here at the bottom there is a star with one, two, three. That's the icon
for visual schedules. Let me get out of this schedule and show you a little -- maybe I
can't do that. When you click on that initially there should be a number of different schedules
that pop up and then you can select one. Here, I've already started a routine and so I have
to complete that routine in order to get out of this part of the App.
Here, you can see that it's a bedtime routine and brushing teeth has been checked, so that's
something that the student you're working with has already completed. Then say I've
now washed my face as well. The App speaks out loud to you. Let me see if I can turn
up the volume on this. I thought it was up. When you've completed a task you tap on the
picture or you have a student tap on the picture and a green checkmark pops up telling you
that you've completed it. Then it prompts you to do the next item. Using the toilet
might be the next thing.
I'll show you a snippet of what happens. When you click and the checkmark pops up as the
previous step -- once it has switched to washing hands it actually provided a video of what
washing hands looks like, so that the student can have a video model and watch that in order
to learn how to do the task component. I'll show you in a second what that looks like
adding these things in edit mode. This is showing you a little bit about what, kinds
of, things you can embed into these routines.
After I've completed washing hands the next one pops up. You can see it's fully green
and it's counting down how long that component of the task should take the student to do.
You could have it where brushing teeth should take two minutes or something like that and
embed that into your visual schedule. You can see at the bottom you're working toward
a goal. You can put a picture.
There are lots of symbols built into the App that you can select from, or you can select
a picture from Google, or things like that and embed that to show the student or your
child what they're working toward the whole time that they're using this App. I'm going
to wait a couple of seconds. I'll tell you a couple of things; when you first open the
App you create a user profile because lots of things are found on their store website
and you can purchase them.
There are a lot of free ones. This one I downloaded for free. You can create them and then add
them to the store. Then -- what's really nice about this is when you're at home you can
use this App with a child and send the schedule that you created to the teacher via email
and they can have it on their iPad at the school and use the same thing. They can be
on the same page with you. Let's see if I can finish this routine and get out of it.
Then the student finishes the task and then you're done with this.
With the visual schedule -- you can see I have a lot in my library -- a lot of different
things. Also, scenes are involved in Autismate. What these scenes do is provide the student
with a visual representation of a room that they've entered. They can learn about what,
kinds of, things they can do in the room and how to go about doing them. Sometimes you
can embed visual schedules into these scenes and I'll show you how that works in a second.
This page is a demo page.
There are a lot of different interactive things for you to learn how to use. Then you can
start creating your own scenes. I created one of my office, and I click on that. You
can see a visual representation of what my office looks like and then you can add icons
signifying where new scenes will occur and hot spots. You'll see what a hot spot is in
a second. I've created an icon. I can click on Jenny's desk. This could look like a picture,
a symbol, and a lot of different things, but I chose to make words.
I'll click on Jenny's desk. Here I have what my desk looks like. Now I have what are called
hot spots. There are a lot of different things that you can put into a hot spot. I'll show
you. I'll get into edit mode really quickly so I can show you some of the things that
you can do. When you want to add a hot spot a lot of different things pop up. You can
record a phrase that will be embedded onto the hot spot when the student clicks on it.
Links to other things like other scenes -- in my office, when you clicked on the hot spot
for Jenny's desk it linked to this scene.
I'm going to get out of that. I can show you how I quickly -- just this afternoon -- created
a visual schedule of how to log in to my computer. It should be here. Okay, maybe the visual
schedule didn't save. I'm going to click on the schedule so you can see it. It should
be saved, but I don't know what happened there. This is what will pop up when everything is
saved correctly. I created a schedule for logging into the computer. In edit mode I
can control what each schedule is going to have.
I can set a title, I can add a video showing how to do something, I can record something
that will be spoken out loud, I can set an image -- those can include different pictures
from your photo library, you can take a picture, you can Google Image, and there are lots of
symbols that you can use. I made this really simple to show that you can do this really
quickly on the fly. We'll see how it works. Outside of edit mode it should work. I hit
control, alt, delete, type my username, hit the tab key, type in your password, and then
my goal of using the computer has been met. That shows you a little bit.
Some of the other hot spots I created are a hot spot on the right for the printer. What
I did in edit mode was I selected to have it record a phrase so that I could ask somebody
-- if I was nonverbal -- to help me print something off. I recorded my own voice. You
can actually use a synthesized voice and type in what you want the computerized voice to
say as well. You don't have to listen to yourself if you don't like that. These scenes are also
GPS located, so you can take this iPad anywhere and the GPS should pick up and tell you that
you've made it to Walmart.
It should open up a bunch of scenes for you dedicated to that setting. It can work for
school, or house, or wherever in the community that this child might need to use this App.
Lastly is the sentence builder. If I click on the smiley face at the bottom that's talking
I come up with something that looks a lot like FroLoco to Go. It helps build sentences
for the student to speak. You could click I want -- some of these are folders, so you
can find I want the tablet and click on that. Then when you click on the actual sentence
that's built up at the top it will speak it out loud.
The nice thing about this App is -- within a recent update you can now move different
phrases to different folders and have multiple -- that phrase in multiple different folders.
If you needed -- if the child had a lot of trouble leaving the folders to quickly type
I want, you can have I want in all the folders so that they could go I want some, type of,
food, I want some, type of, thing, or some person, et cetera. Another component of the
update is in the bottom right corner there is the addition of a keyboard so that the
student can type if they choose to do so. That's the surface of what this App really
does.
It would be a very extensive webinar otherwise. This is a quick overview of a lot of the things
that it does. I mainly worked with the visual schedule and I think it really, really helped
the students that I was working with this past year. I highly recommend this App. You
can check out this webinar later via our ICATER Toolkit App and many of our other webinars
that we've done in the past year. Have a good week everybody.