Educational Apps for Teaching Children With Autism

 Many teachers, counselors, and parents of children with autism spectrum disorder, are using educational apps to help kids organize their days, learn a variety of skills, and improve overall communication. After the success of educational apps like "Make Sentences" and "Just Match" that can run on iPads and tabs, researchers have begun to explore ways for harnessing these common devices to teach adaptive skills to autistic children.

It's the interactive nature of these apps that have made them hugely popular with the kids. The educational apps help autistic children can take advantage of the strong visual-processing skills. The apps tap their interest and use the same as a teaching mechanism. While the "Make Sentences" and "Just Match" autism education apps have paved the way for scientists to research what more can be taught with them, other companies have begun to harness their utilities.

The capabilities of these new-age digital devices like iPhones, tabs, and smart phones to capture videos and photos, combined with the schedulers, reminders, and calendars, make them useful for teaching adaptive and cognitive skills. They can be used to communicate, and impart social skills and cause-effect relationships. A child can be given a visual schedule to build or follow. Autistic children usually prefer to learn adaptive skills via video presentations that the "Make Sentences" and "Just Match" educational apps facilitates, rather than following the traditional form of instructions from an individual. Besides, recording video on traditional media, is very time-consuming.

This is where iPads and smart phones score over the more conventional forms. Recording and editing videos on CDs and DVDs was a very lengthy process. But iPads and smartphones have eased that.

It has become simplistic with iPads and smart phones. A picture or a video can be taken anywhere. Autistic children tend to lend more attention to videos because they are easily distracted by people in social situations.

Generalization or applying skills to real-life situations, from the video learning modules in autism educational apps, is much more consistent. When kids see the same models repeatedly, it becomes easy for them to imitate. But in the case of a live person, it's difficult to be consistently repetitive.

Caregivers, counselors, educators, and almost anybody associated with imparting education to children with autism spectrum disorder. Both the "Make Sentences" and "Just Match" are regularly updated with new technologies so that users can access the latest content. The day may not be far when these educational apps will be used in all schools across the US.