A colleague and I have had a paper that we presented at an Asia Pacific Autism Conference some years ago just published in a Routledge textbook titled 'Gaming Disability: Disability Perspectives on Contemporary Video Games.
Every year the United Nations sets a theme for World Autism Awareness Day. The theme for this year is ‘Assistive Technologies, Active Participation’. At first, the definition of the term assistive technologies might seem quite obvious — you might think of technology like a hearing aid to support someone with hearing related needs, or perhaps even a motorised wheelchair to help with physical access. These are definitely pieces of assistive technology, but what else fits into this space, and how does assistive technology relate to autism?
In September the new operating system for mobile Apple devices, iOS 11, will likely be released, and with its release will come a new world of apps that build on the new development platform that Apple has created, ARKit, which puts unprecedented opportunities to develop augmented reality solutions in the hands of the world. We have already seen some spectacular demonstrations of what ARKit is capable of, and as always when new technological opportunities present themself, I consider what this could mean for the world of autism support and the education of children on the autism spectrum.
I adore music. While there are too many artistic and sensory delights to hold in ones mind at any one time with regards to the wonder and beauty that the history of creativity have so far conjured, for me there is little competition for the central seat that music has in my consciousness. It is both a mystery that requires no preconditions upon it to make concrete sense or relate to anything that we perceive within our big real, but at the same time it is but a simple bird song that can be divided into equal measures and learned by an infant repeating the rhythms of a rhyme.
As ubiquitous as iPad implementation is across so many education settings, we must make sure that we continue to understand the most effective and forward thinking modes of classroom use that will realise the greatest value of the device. On the back of my 2017 iPad Toolbox for Special Educationpost that has gained a lot of interest this past month, I present here a summary of content and topics that I cover in a ninety minute version of my 'iPad Model Classroom' full day course. You might find ideas below that you could utilise in your own staff development sessions, or it might lead you to seek out other examples of the practices noted so you can build them into your own teaching repertoire.
After school returns in a few days, we will have a week before it is Anzac Day. This year is the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli campaign. To help our students on the autism spectrum engage in understanding the Anzac campaign, I have put together an iTunes U course filled composed of visual history activities for classes to work through.
My wife is working in an early childhood environment at the moment, and we've been talking about the type of creative iPad pedagogy that can be applied to the learning interests of very young children. One of the subjects we keep returning to is music - we both love music and realise the value it has in our own daughter's life, the way that singing and dancing and a sense of joy associated with rhythm and melody contribute to the fluency of our waking hours. For my own part I particularly enjoy experimental music and ideas associated with organising noise into musical structures, with particular resonance to the way that young children can create and enjoy sounds that might not typically be associated with pure harmony.
This past week I have been working on a new resource. Available now in the iBooks Store, it is a new text I have written titled 'The Digital Organic - Using iPad in the Garden'. Its purpose is to guide readers through a series of projects that utilise iPad in the school garden, with notes relating to particular ways of achieving these projects in relation to autism education goals.
I've always enjoyed creating movies with the classes of children with autism I've worked with. I established an annual routine as a classroom teacher where we would set one term aside to create a nearly feature length class movie, allowing ourselves a good span of time to really sink our teeth into all the auxiliary facets of creating a movie. We established a budget, project managed the creation of props and deadlines for parts of the script to be be completed. We assigned tasks around the class - who wants to compose the soundtrack, who can help with set design - and pulled together as a united collective.
There is an interesting paper, Klin, A., Danovitch, J. H., Merz, A. B., & Volkmar, F. R. (2007). Circumscribed interests in higher functioning individuals with autism spectrum disorders: An exploratory study. Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities, 32(2), 89-100, in which a number of special interest areas are described and categorised in an effort to highlight how these areas relate to areas of talent that some individuals with autism possess. For example, the paper notes that some children with autism show particular strength in categorising and ordering information, such as being able to relate types of dinosaur to particular geological periods, or, in the case of a student I once worked with, to be able to categorise types of public phone boxes and to order them by the frequency they appeared in local suburbs.
