Technology Engages Children with Autism
Published in ‘Belonging Early Years Journal, Vol 6 No 1’, 2017.
The learning needs of children with autism are as diverse as the learning needs of all children. The need to develop good strategies relating to communication, social play skills and emotional regulation are ever present across the spectrum of childhood, however one of the key differences for children on the autism spectrum is just how pronounced these needs can be. A social skill need that for one children that can be addressed and supported within a couple of minutes may for a child with autism rather require months of dedicated support with sophisticated interventions in place to help them address the same need.
One of the considerations I always keep in mind regarding the education of children with autism is just how dedicated to innovation we need to be to keep on top of the most effective teaching and intervention strategies. Creativity is at the heart of best practice here, and as the needs of our children change as quick as the pace of life around us, it is important to recognise the tools that help us to keep pace with our children. In my work as a teacher of children with autism, the tool that best allows me to achieve this is the iPad.
While the iPad has been around for seven years now, we are still making exciting discoveries every day about the best and most innovative ways of using it to teach our children with autism and to help families to better understand the strategies we use to work with their children. At its core, there is a very special relationship between the iPad and the way that children with autism interact with it. We know that children with autism are very visual learners, we know that the architecture of their brain is wired to process visual input in a very powerful manner. And we also know that children with autism benefit from multi-sensory input, in that they benefit from learning with sound, with tactile learning experiences, and more, to share information about the world around and inside of them. These are some of the reasons that the iPad is so engaging for our children with autism, in that it connects so naturally to the way they prefer to engage with learning experiences.
There are two core ways in which I find iPad is best utilised in early childhood settings with children with autism. The first is to address individual goals that children with autism have with regards to the way they find success of a day, such as for example a goal relating to how they understand and can follow the daily routine. While we all know of the value of using visual timetables to address this need, we also know just how difficult it can be to have a visual timetable of the day on hand at all times for when you need it most, or how difficult it can be when things change and you need to take photos of new activities and then print them out and laminate them for your timetable.
However, using an app like Choiceworks on your iPad can provide you with a powerful visual timetable that you have on you at all times and that can allow you to take photos of new activities and edit them into the timetable in an instant. This can be an absolute life saver when you have a child with autism who is distressed at not understanding the expectations and routine of the day. As well, with Choiceworks you can share the visual timetables you make straight to the families of the children you are working with, so they have the same tools to help their child process the events of the day. There are a myriad of similar uses of the iPad to address the core functional needs for children with autism in ways that traditional resources cannot address with the same ease and effectiveness.
The other key way in which I use iPad is as a tool that helps make play and learning experiences more accessible to children with autism. The other day I was working with a child with autism who was having great difficulty in engaging with imaginative play with his peers. His friends were playing a game outside that required a lot of social language and the ability to improvise in unstructured ways that proved very difficult for the child with autism. In response, I helped to set up a more structured play situation that encouraged students to play in the garden with little Lego characters, helping the characters to explore the strange world of huge vegetables and plants around them.
The child with autism then used an iPad to photograph scenes that the characters were involved in and started to build a comic strip telling a story about these brave explorers in an alien land. The comic strip then became a movie, and the children then started recording sounds from the garden to add in as a soundtrack for the movie, and before long the group of children were all collaborating with each other on different creative roles they could contribute to the story. The iPad gave us the opportunity to help structure and focus, in a very visual and multi-sensory way, a brilliant play based experience that ensured the child with autism found success and a whole lot of fun with this his friends through this imaginative activity.
With a spirit of innovation and creative thinking within you, there is little better tool in an early childhood setting than an iPad to help address the varied needs of our children with autism, and indeed all of our children. For free resources to support you to better understand the needs of children with autism and the way that iPad can be best used in this space, you can visit my website at www.AutismPedagogy.com
