The Digital Native Speaks.

One of my Facebook friends posted this video of a digital native letting teachers know that in no uncertain terms that they MUST get on board with the interent & technology thing:




I sense that this kid's dad has a job in educational technology- this video might be his way of motivating teachers to get along with the digital natives they face every day in their classrooms.

I missed this one! Design and the Elastic Mind - the Interactive Data Visualization Exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, 2008 (Johnathan Harris and Sep Kamva)

The installation, "I want you to want me", is an exploration of the search for love and self in the world of online dating.  It was created by Johnathan Harris and Sep Kramvar, for the 2008 Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. The installation has several movements that focus on the following themes:  


Who I Am, What I Want, Snippets, Matchmaker, and Breakdowns.  The result is a moving  glimpse into what it is like to be human and looking for a relationship in the digital age:  




RELATED
"I Want You to Want Me" website
We Feel Fine interactive website, by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar

In March of 2008, I spent some time digging deep into We Feel Fine website. I uploaded screen shots of photos and text to Flickr, which are displayed in the slideshow below:



Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

The following is a link to a post I wrote in January of 2009, highlighting some of Jonathan Harris's work:
Digital Storytelling Platforms and Multiple Perspectives: A look at the work of Johnathan Harris - Food for Thought for Interactive Timeline Design

SOMEWHAT RELATED
I came across the link to this information from Anne Helmond's New Media Research blog, which addresses the fact all of the information we generate publicly on the web through our blogs, Facebook comments, and tweets, is readily available for data mining and storing. Here's the beginning of her post:

"A few hours ago the following tweet by @librarycongress appeared in my timeline  “Library acquires ENTIRE Twitter archive. ALL tweets. More info here http://go.usa.gov/ik4”"

All your tweets are belong to us

Interactive Alice in Wonderland Book for the iPad

I missed this one!

Alice in Wonderland Interactive Book for the iPad

Exploring Post-WIMP Interaction- "Manual Deskterity: An Exploration of Simultaneous Pen + Touch Direct Input

The video tells it all.

From Ken Hinckley's YouTube Channel

Thanks to Tony Uhrick for the link!>

Interesting journal: Aether- The Journal of Media Geography (A convergence of disciplines)

Aether is hosted by the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at California State University, Northridge. The April issue is editied by Tristan Thielmann, and "explores the spatial turn in media studies and the media turn in geographical studies, providing a sketch of the subject area "geomedia" from a phenomenological perspective and the field of "media geography" from a disciplinary perspective".

Tristan Thielmann, from the University of Seigen, introduces this topic in "Locative Media and Mediated Localities: An Introduction to Media Geography" (pdf)


Thanks to Anne Galloway for the link!


By the way,  Anne Galloway has been blogging since 2002.  Her blog chronicles her intellectual path as she worked on her Ph.D., and more recently, her experiences teaching courses such as "Design Anthropology".    


Her dissertation, "A Brief History of the Future of Urban Computing and Locative Media" (pdf) was completed in 2008. If you are interested in ubiquitous computing and interesting theories, its worth reading, especially if your brain needs some deep feeding.  


I plan to re-read it this summer.


Here is an excerpt:

"The types of ubiquitous or pervasive computing of primary interest in my thesis are those that openly seek to create unique forms of inhabitable space and means of habitation—thereby raising issues of spatialisation, temporalisation, embodiment and affect. So-called mixed reality technologies are explicitly concerned with such questions, and mixed reality environments refer to spaces that combine elements of the physical and virtual worlds. According to Milgram et al. (1994:1), “rather than regarding the two concepts simply as antitheses, however, it is more convenient to view them as lying at opposite ends of a continuum, which we refer to as the Reality-Virtuality (RV) continuum.” At one end of the continuum are seen to be “real” objects that can be observed directly or "sampled and then resynthesized via some display device,” while at the other end are “virtual” objects that are “simulated” through “some sort of a description, or model, of the object” (Milgram and Kishino 1994:1).



SOMEWHAT RELATED
I plan to find out more about the editorial board of Aether:    

Paul C. Adams • University of Texas at Austin

Stuart C. Aitken • San Diego State University

David B. Clarke • Swansea University

Christina Dando • University of Nebraska, Omaha

Deborah Dixon • Aberystwyth University

Marcus Doel • Swansea University

Colin R. Gardner • University of California, Santa Barbara

Ken Hillis • The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Sarah F. Ives • Stanford University

Ed Jackiewicz • California State University, Northridge

John Paul Jones III • University of Arizona

Christina Kennedy • Northern Arizona University

Minelle Mahtani • University of Toronto

Susan Mains • University of the West Indies, Mona

Kevin McHugh • Arizona State University

Christopher M. Moreno • San Diego State University

Wolfgang Natter • Virginia Polytechnic Institute

Joseph Palis • University of the Philippines

Brent J. Piepergerdes • University of Kansas

Rob Shields • University of Alberta

Amy Siciliano • University of Wisconsin

Paul F. Starrs • University of Reno, Nevada

Dan Sutko • North Carolina State University

Jonathan Taylor • California State University, Fullerton

Stefan Zimmermann • University of Mainz

Leo Zonn • University of Texas

Interesting work: Mobile Projection & More from Johannes Shoening's YouTube channel

Here are a few videos of Johannes Schoening's research videos related to mobile projection:








SOMEWHAT RELATED: 

GeoLens: Allowing Multi-User Interaction with Geographic Information Systems on Interactive Surfaces

Teresa Brazen's Adaptive Path blog post: Explaining User Experience Design to High Schoolers (and other new audiences)

Teresa Brazen, from Adaptive Path, wrote a useful post about Explaining User Experience Design to High Schoolers (and other new audiences).  In the US, we have lower rates of students deciding to pursue careers in technology-related fields, and among teen girls, the numbers are quite low.  For example,

I've promised to give a little presentation to high school computer students about human-computer interaction and user experience design, with an eye on emerging technologies. I found Teresa's suggestions quite helpful.  For a 15-year-old student, these technologies will be the tools of their work, should they decide to go forward with technology-related studies after high school. For anyone thinking about speaking to a group of high school students, Teresa brings up a few good points:

"The thing about high school kids is they won’t pretend to be interested if you’ve lost them. Adults at a conference will gaze forward in your general direction, but high school kids will just put their head on the table and go to sleep. If you ever want to get a real gauge of how interesting a speaker you are (or how well you’re really communicating), I highly recommend it, humbling as it is."


Any high school teacher will confirm that this is true.

Teresa links to a post on Ben Chun's "And Yet It Moves: Adventures in Teaching and Technology" blog, which is worth reading.  Ben teaches at Galileao Academy of Science and Technology, within the Academy of Information Technology.  He also teachers AP Computer Science.  Prior to teaching technology, he taught math for two years. He has good insights to share.

SOMEWHAT RELATED:


Edutopia
Ring, S. (2007)  Tech gURLS: Closing the Technological Gender Gap

National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT)

Alvarado, C., Dodds, Z. Women in CS:  An Evaluation of Three Promising Practices. In Proceedings of SIGCSE  2010  ACM Press.

Update on Ideum: Multitouch, Multiuser Table at the California Science Center

Ideum is a company that has been around since 1999.  It focuses on the design and creation of "computer-based exhibits, multitouch installations, rich Internet applications, and social networking sites for museum and Web visitors."   Gestureworks is the software developed by Ideum, which is an authoring solution for Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex.

Below is some information, including a video clip, of one of Ideum's most recent installations a multiuser, multitouch table at the California Science Center.

Case Study:  Ideum's  L.A. Zone Multi-touch, Multiuser Table (Jim Spadaccini)

Here is an excerpt from Jim Spadaccini's post:
"This multiuser, multitouch table exhibit in the L.A. Zone allows visitors to explore a satellite image and map of the LA Basin and view overlays in thematic areas that explore fire, air, water, and earth. In addition, points of interest are placed on the map in the form of images and videos. All of the content and navigational controls are available in English and Spanish. The exhibit software runs on a custom-built 50" multitouch table that supports 60+ simultaneous points of input."

The Ideum team has spent a great deal of attention to the way groups of museum visitors interact with their multitouch applications. In the past, they've noticed that on a 50" surface, visitors would experience interaction conflicts. In the present application, more than one visitor can manipulate the content without changing the interaction of others.  Spadaccini points out that multi-user control of touch screen exhibits is new, so interface design concepts developed for single-user interaction are no longer useful.  Social interactions around a multiuser display are now something to consider.

In my opinion, what the Ideum team learns through their design process can be quite useful to those of us planning to develop multiuser educational applications for interactive surfaces and displays. What I liked about this exhibit is that it has a monitor that mirrors the display, so people can view the interaction from afar.  This feature would be useful in classroom settings that have an interactive table and an interactive whiteboard. The interactive whiteboard as the secondary display so the teacher and other students could see what the group at the table was exploring.



Multitouch Google Maps and Flickr Mashup Built with Flash



Update: A video showing how Ideum's multi-touch table can withstand all sorts of heavy-duty treatment:




Note:I have been pretty busy over the past couple of months- I have much that I haven't yet blogged about.  More to come!

ASU's SMALLab, a Mixed Reality Learning Environment : Multi-modal, and Collaborative; Links to Publications about Digital Media and Learning for the 21st Century

"Nothing's impossible, we just get smarter and smarter by the day." - Student, commenting about his experiences in the SMALLab environment. 


The research team at Arizona State university, lead by David Birchfield, has worked to create embodied, multimodal, and collaborative mediated learning learning environments using mixed reality that has been in use at Coronado High School with much success. The SMALLab is a learner-centered approach to learning that provides multi-modal, multi-sensory activities that engages learners, and also results in deeper understanding of more complex concepts.


Here is some information from the SMALLab website:

SMALLab @ Arizona State University - 2009 from aisling kelliher on Vimeo.


Video of high school students describing their work in SMALLab (Coronado High School)
"Central to our work is the development of a new interactive mixed reality learning environment, the Situated Multimedia Art Learning Lab [SMALLab]. SMALLab is an environment developed by a collaborative team of media researchers from education, psychology, interactive media, computer science, and the arts.  SMALLab is an extensible platform forsemi-immersive, mixed-reality learning. By semi-immersive, we mean that the mediated space of SMALLab is physically open on all sides to the larger environment.  Participants can freely enter and exit the space without the need for wearing specialized display or sensing devices such as head-mounted displays (HMD) or motion capture markers.  Participants seated or standing around SMALLab can see and hear the dynamic media, and they can directly communicate with their peers that are interacting in the space. As such, the semi-immersive framework establishes a porous relationship between SMALLab and the larger physical learning environment.  By mixed-reality, we mean that there is an integration of physical manipulation objects, 3D physical gestures, and digitally mediated components.  Byextensible, we mean that researchers, teachers, and students can create new learning scenarios in SMALLab using a set of custom designed authoring tools and programming interfaces.

SMALLab supports situated and embodied learning by empowering the physical body to function as an expressive interface. Within SMALLab, students use a set of “glowballs” and peripherals to interact in real time with each other and with dynamic visual, textual, physical and sonic media through full body 3D movements and gestures.  For example, working in theSpring Sling scenario, students are immersed in a complex physics simulation that involves multiple sensory inputs to engage student attention.  They can hear the sound of a spring picking up speed, see projected bodies moving across the floor, feel a physical ball in their own hands and integrate how the projected ball moves in accordance with their own body movements to construct a robust conceptual model of the entire system."


SLINK links the various installations of SMALLab, which are found in museums, schools, the Institute of Play in NYC (used with students who attend the digital-games based, technology-rich charter school, Quest to Learn), 

-Institute of Play's SMALLab

-Arizona State University: A SMALL way to keep up with technology (Sheilah Britton, 5/11/09)

-Arizona State University:  A SMALL way to keep up with technology (Sheilah Britton, 5/11/09)
How SMALLab Works:





More about the way it works: SMALLab-Situated Multimedia Arts Learning


About David Birchfield:
David Birchfield is "a media artist, researcher, and educator.  He has created work that spans from interactive music performance to generative software to robotic installationsn to K-12 learning environments. In recent years, this work cuts across three areas of exploration:K-12 learning, media art installations, and live computer music performance."


Some publications:
              Birchfield, D., Megowan-Romanowicz, Johnson-Glenberg, M., Next Gen Interfaces: Embodied Learning Using Motion, Sound, and Visuals – SMALLab. To appear in Proceedings of the American Educational Research Association Annual Conference; SIG Applied Research in Virtual Environments for Learning [ARVEL], San Diego, CA, April 2009.
               Megowan-Romanowicz, M., Uysal, S., Birchfield, D., Growth in Teacher Self-Efficacy Through Participation in a High-Tech Instructional Design Community, to appear in proceedings of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching Annual Conference, Garden Grove, CA, April 2009.

• Birchfield, D., Thornburg, H., Megowan-Romanowicz, C., Hatton, S., Mechtley, B., Dolgov, I., Burleson, W., Embodiment, Multimodality, and Composition: Convergent Themes Across HCI and Education for Mixed-Reality Learning Environments, Journal of Advances in Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 2008, Article ID 874563.

• Dolgov, I., Birchfield, D., McBeath, M., Thornburg, H., Todd, C., Amelioration of Axis-Aligned Motion Bias for Active versus Stationary Judgments of Bilaterally Symmetric Moving Shapes’ Final Destinations, Perception and Psychophysics, in press 2008.

• D. Birchfield, B. Mechtley, S. Hatton, H. Thornburg, Mixed-Reality Learning in the Art Museum Context, Proceedings of ACM SIG Multimedia, Vancouver, BC, October 27, 2008.

• S. Hatton, D. Birchfield, M.C. Megowan, Learning Metaphor through Mixed-Reality Game Design and Game Play, Proceedings of ACM Sandbox Conference, Los Angeles, CA, August 10, 2008. [pdf]

Institute of Play's SMALLab contact:
          Katie Salen, Executive Director, Institute of Play Associate Professor, Parsons The New School for Design

The Institute of Play, along with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and others, have a number of publications related to technology and learning:

About the Joan Ganz Cooney Center:

"The mission of The Joan Ganz Cooney Center is to catalyze and support research, innovation and investment in digital media technologies to advance children's learning. Nurturing foundational and "21st century" literacies:

The inaugural focus of the Center—given the national need—will be on determining how technology can help elementary-aged children develop the fundamental building blocks of literacy. These include the vital reading, writing, speaking and listening capabilities that all children must develop during the primary grades. A special emphasis of the Center will be on struggling readers who risk educational failure if they do not catch up to their peers by grade four...Another important focus of the Center is to leverage the potential of interactive media to promote "21st century" literacies that students will need to compete and cooperate in our connected world—competencies such as critical thinking and problem solving, second language competency, inter-cultural understanding and media literacy."

Here are a few background resources from the Institute of Play's resources page:
The following reports will bring you up-to-date about technology and "21st Century" learning.
Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds
The Kaiser Family Foundation - Report - 2010
Wallis, C. The Impacts of Media Multitasking on Children’s Learning & Development
The Joan Ganz Cooney Center - Meeting Report - 2010 (pdf)
Shuler, C. iLearn: A Content Analysis of the iTunes App Store’s Education Section
The Joan Ganz Cooney Center - Report - 2009 (pdf)
Wellings, J., Levine, M.H.The Digital Promise: Transforming Learning with Innovative Uses of Technology
The Joan Ganz Cooney Center - White Paper - 2009 (pdf)
Thai, A. M., Lowenstein, D., Ching, D., and Rejeski, D. Game Changer: Investing in Digital Play to Advance Children's Learning and Health
The Joan Ganz Cooney Center - Policy Brief - 2009 (pdf)

There are a number of similar articles published by CISCO and/or the Metiri Group:
Lemke, C., Coughlin, E., Reifsneider, D. (2009). Technology in the Schools: What Does the Research Say? (pdf)
Lemke, C. (2009) Multitimodal Learning through Media:  What the Research Says (pdf)
Williams, S.M. The Impact of Collaborative, Scaffolded Learning in K-12 Schools: A Meta-Analysis (pdf)

NY Time's David Pogue: iPad Town Hall Video

My daughter called me this morning to let me know that one of her house-mates has a brand-new iPad. So stay tuned. If I get a chance to play with it, I might do a hands-on review!

WeSpace and the i-Land Roomware: Second Generation of Interactivity

Here's something I came across while looking up information about technology-rich environments:


Roomware
"We describe the i-LAND environment which constitutes an example of our vision of the workspaces of the future, in this case supporting cooperative work of dynamic teams with changing needs. i-LAND requires and provides new forms of human-computer interaction and new forms of computer-supported cooperative work. Its design is based on an integration of information and architectural spaces, implications of new work practices and an empirical requirements study informing our design. i-LAND consists of several roomware components, i.e. computer-augmented objects integrating room elements with information technology. We present the current realization of i-LAND in terms of an interactive electronic wall, an interactive table, two computer-enhanced chairs, and two bridges for the Passage-mechanism. This is complemented by the description of the creativity support application and the technological infrastructure. The paper is accompanied by a video figure in the CHI99 video program."


Are we there yet?

A Long Mix of Topics: Updates - Cognitive "bursts", technology-supported interventions, interactive whiteboards, digital storytelling, social skills, and reflections about a new SMARTtable.

UPDATED


In this post, I share some of my reflections about the new multi-touch SMARTTable that arrived last week at one of the programs I serve as a school psychologist.  I decided to update two posts I wrote in 2008, because they provide links and resources that will be useful to my colleagues as we explore this exciting technological tool.
We have a SMARTTable!  

-SMART Technologies

The SMARTTable arrived last Thursday!  

I'll be meeting with some of my colleagues to review our growing library of digital content and figure out what sort of content and activities we can quickly import into the toolkit that came with the SMARTTable.  We also will  refine our ideas about a new application that we hope to enter in a contest sponsored by SMART Technologies.  (I have a few experiments I created using C#, WPF, and Visual Studio 2008 that I'd like to flesh out for the SMARTTable.  I'm counting on one of the teacher assistants, a retired computer programmer who is familiar with C++, to help, and hopefully, a few high school computer students.)


Note: The SMARTTable developer's SKD works on 32-bit Windows computers, according to a representative from SMARTTechnologies.  My computer is 64 bit.  I am investigating ways to work around this problem without having to spend additional money.  

Update:  Should be fine using Windows 7!

In the meantime, I'm thinking of ways the SMARTTable can be used for the students I work with to share their developing "sense of self" with others, focusing on the following questions:

Who am I? (Strengths, skills, preferences, barriers, etc.)

How do I feel? How do I share my feelings with others?
What are the coping strategies I can use when I feel upset?
What is my relationship to the physical world? (Objects, Places)
What is my relationship to the social world?     (Family, Community)
How can I share my sense of self with others?
How do I respond to what others share with me?

I have worked with students of all ages and abilities, usually in pairs or small  groups, on non-digital tables my entire career.  This is the case for many support professionals in the schools, such as school psychologists, school counselors, speech and language therapists, and literacy specialists.  In my case, I have over 20 years of activities related to just about any problem that has come my way.  Coming up with content isn't the problem - the challenge is figuring out how things can be transformed for use on the multi-touch tabletop.

I think the best approach is to focus on the activities I use  when I start a new group. Many of the teamwork and icebreaker activities  I use that help the students learn how  to participate in a group would translate nicely to a multi-touch table. These activities would be useful to counselors and speech and language therapists. They might also be useful to teachers when form new cooperative or collaborative learning groups in the classroom.  

I'm looking forward to learning how all of this can inter-operate:

From what I understand, the computer running the SMARTTable was not intended for accessing internet applications, and does not have anti-virus software.  I mistakenly thought that since the table was Wi-Fi enabled, I could readily access all of the single-touch web applications I use with students.  Maybe things will change.  I imagine that educational websites optimized for multi-touch would be something worth considering for the future, especially if more school schools adopt tabletop technologies.   (It would be nice to have AAC devices, video cameras, laptops, handhelds, and the Internet included in this picture.)

(Below is information from a previous post)


Introduction

Over the past several years, I have worked closely with young people who have severe autism, and during this time, I have taken a variety of computer science, software information systems, and educational technology courses. Over time, I've integrated the use of technology, including digital photography and videography into my work. In some ways, it is still a much-unchartered territory.  Through this work, I've come up with some insights that I'd like to share.

Cognitive Bursts
I've noticed that many young people who are "on-the-spectrum" experience what I call "cognitive bursts", often around puberty, but also during the late teen and early 20's. 

To an untrained eye, these bursts might go unnoticed, or even minimized.  These bursts can't easily be captured through traditional psychological or educational assessments, since these tests were designed for more typically developing students. For example, a young person with ASD might not be able to make a choice in response to a test item by pointing. Another student might not be able to respond to a test item because they do not speak.  An individually-administered cognitive assessment might not generate "IQ" scores that fully reflect significant cognitive gains, especially when the student has delays in language development and working/short term memory deficits.

As a professional, I know that it is not appropriate to provide parents with false hope. I know that the tools we have for assessing cognitive growth among students with autism spectrum disorders are not adequate. For example, two students can have the same "IQ" at age 3, 5, 8- or any age, but function much differently at age 18 or 25.  This is especially true for young people who have attention problems, working memory deficits, and/or delays in language development relative to their non-verbal abilities.

My point is that we must take early cognitive assessment  scores with a grain of salt, and   ensure that there are multiple opportunities for meaningful assessment and significant intervention during other points of a young person's development.

In my opinion, the more severe the situation, the more intensive the intervention!

Special education for students with more severe disabilities has always focused on early identification and early intervention, and for much of my career, "early intervention" was my mantra.   Over the past few years, I have come to the realization that the focus on early intervention is only a small part of the bigger picture.   While some young people make tremendous gains through early intervention, some do not, and this does NOT suggest that they won't have the potential to make significant gains later in their childhood, teens, or early adulthood.   

By focusing primarily on early intervention, we might be missing the boat. We must do more across the young person's development through young adulthood (and of course, beyond.) Each child is different, and each brain's course of development is different. One child may be ripe for growth at 30 months of age, or at age 3 or 4. Another might start talking and initiating interactions at age 14, or begin to make sense of print at age 16! I know one severely autistic youth who was reading at an 8th grade level at age 22, something that probably would not have been predicted by those who worked with him during his early years.

From what I've observed in special education, cognitive bursts are often noticed by a team of perceptive teachers, therapists, and support workers, at which point meet to discuss ways to harness this opportunity to facilitate academic, communication, and at times, social interaction skills development. While this may not be the case for each student and in each school, it really does happen! 

When a student experiences a "burst", no matter how insignificant it might look on the surface, we are given a golden opportunity to fashion an integrated approach to moving the young person forward, and at the same time, help the student develop a more solid sense of self. For students with severe autism, this might be a key to opening up their world.

Technology can help.
Because each young person develops differently, it is important that interventions designed to facilitate this sort of growth be available at all points of development, not limited to the intensive support that is recommended for the youngest of this group.  My mantra now is intervention, intervention, intervention, and INTENSIVE technology-supported intervention during periods of cognitive growth, across the developmental stages, as appropriate.

Here is what I've been doing:
I'm spending a higher percentage of my time observing students in a variety of settings, using video and digital photography to capture my observations. I am using digital content during my assessment process, and I'm using digital content for creating intervention activities that assist in measuring a student's progress over time.  

I am not alone in gathering digital content - at one of my schools, the speech and language therapist, the community-based vocational education teacher, and other teachers have still and video cameras on hand.  Every classroom in this particular school now has an interactive whiteboard (IWB), which has proven to be an effective means of sharing our digital content. The IWB is often used to provide the students with an opportunity to share their own digital content with others. By incorporating this digital content into curricular activities, were finding  that teens with autism can develop a sense of self, which in turn provides an internal  "anchor" that can scaffold their learning of social-interpersonal skills.  

What seems to be working?
I use quite a bit of digital content in my work. Some of it is generated by my colleagues, some of it I do myself, and some of the content is provided by parents.  I often take pictures and video of a student's familiar activities and settings, from the first-person point of view. To do this, I follow the student around in school, home, and/or community setting, and then shoot the various scenes as if I was in the young person's shoes.  In this way, the camera is a window to the student's world, as they see it. I supplement the video with digital photography of the same content, which then can be incorporated into an interactive PowerPoint or slide-show.   I share this content with my colleagues so they can incorporate it in their work.   

This content is used for digital social stories, preparing for community outings and job-trials, student-led IEPs, student-led presentations, and video modeling. 
I also spend some time taking video-clips and pictures of familiar items and objects the student encounters throughout the day, such as teaching materials that the teachers put up on the walls, computer screen shots, video clips of favorite songs and scenes from the television that the student watches, screen shots of educational software that the student uses, and so forth.

I use Kidspiration,  Inspiration, Umajin, and Powerpoint for much of this work. These applications are user-friendly and provide multi-modal output.  In some applications, there is a text-to-speech component that is great for pairing words with visual representations.

How does this work? 
I usually sit beside a student in a comfortable, familiar spot, with my laptop placed where it can be accessed by both the student and myself. We look at the content together. For students who are used to using a switch, I have one available.

I've found that strategies that incorporate digital media provide a means for students to generated more language and communication. This is often initiated by the students!

With students who have autism spectrum disorders, establishing a connection, through digital photography and videography, focusing on familiar things is especially important. Taking the time to capture the student's world, from their perspective, is mandatory, in my opinion. By doing this, we are providing specific information that might help to answer unspoken questions that the young person has, but lacks the skills to formulate or articulate - for example, "Who am I, and what is my relationship to this physical world?"

By taking this approach, the adults - teachers, parents, assistants - who are involved with the student, can work to build a solid scaffold for further learning and interaction. Bit-by-bit, digital content - pictures, video clips, can be built into the process to facilitate social awareness and social-emotional interaction skills. By learning about familiar people, how they "tick", and how one should go about interacting with these people, the student might gain a sense of self within a social context.  We can help them answer the question we all have, at one time or another: "Who am I, and what is my relationship to this social world?" 

Comments:
At the beginning of the 2008-09 school year, I started bringing in my HP TouchSmart PC to use with students multiple needs and those who have autism.   I've used software that takes advantage of the HP TouchSmart's duo-touch capabilities, and found that paired activities using this feature increase joint-attention behaviors, something that is important in the development of social interaction skills among young people with autism. We've used the video camera and Skype to "call" various classrooms, with the image displayed on the classroom's interactive whiteboard.  Now that every classroom has an IWB, there are possibilities for all sorts of communication activities between classrooms at the school level, and with others outside of the school. 

My mantra now is intervention, intervention, intervention, and INTENSIVE technology-supported intervention during periods of cognitive growth, across the developmental stages, as appropriate.

An Interactive Whiteboard in Each Classroom!

SMARTboards were installed in classrooms at Wolfe School during the current school year (2009-10), and have been well-utilized. Most of the teachers caught on very quickly after a short workshop and a little bit of experimentation.   I've noticed that my colleagues are motivated to explore interactive educational resources on the web and play around with the SMARTBoard resources as well.  The reason is that on the large screen, much of the content grabs the students' attention.  This provides the  teachers  a window of time to engage the students in learning and communication activities.   


All of this has taken place in a very short period of time. 

Ubiquitous IWBs have changed the way I conduct assessments of students with multiple or more severe disabilities. I've started using the SMARTboard for informal assessment, especially for students who have limited language abilities and do not point with precision.  For example,  the National Gallery of Art has a website just for young people, the "Kids Zone", and on this site are many activities that are great for IWB interaction.   

PLACES is a panoramic landscape activity that introduces children to the fundamentals of landscape and genre painting while offering a glimpse of life in rural America from the late 18th through the mid-19th century. Music and surprising animations enliven the scene, as children experiment with perspective, composition, color, and scale."   

The student can put all sorts of items on the screen, move them anywhere, and resize things.  It is a quick and fun way to see if they have mastered the concepts of size, number, direction, and so forth.  It also is a way to assess basic receptive vocabulary.

The interactive Jungle application on the SMARTBoard was also useful in eliciting joint attention:

"Create an imaginary landscape online with the NGAkids JUNGLE interactive. Mix and match the colorful characters, control the environment by changing weather and lighting conditions, or construct flowers, trees, and plants using special tools. An "AUTO" button generates random compositions, so you can sample program options and experiment with special effects as a starting point for your own designs."

If you plan to use these activities for informal assessment, make sure you have a checklist of what you plan to assess, and also make sure you've spent some time exploring the applications in depth, using the IWB.  The best thing is to practice before you try this with a student. Better yet, see if you can get the student's teacher to practice with you.


JOINT ATTENTION
If you have an IWB in your classroom and you work with students who have autism spectrum disorders, it is good to think of ways you can harness this technology to encourage joint attention among your students.  Here is some information about joint attention, from one of my previous posts:

Joint Attention:Definition of Joint Attention from UConn:
"Joint Attention is the process of sharing one’s experience of observing an object or event, by following gaze or pointing gestures. It is critical for social development, language acquisition, cognitive development…"


Establishing joint attention is an important step in the development of social interaction skills among young people who have autism spectrum disorders.

Joint Attention Study Has Implication for Understanding Autism Science Daily, 9/29/07
Asperger-Advice: Joint Attention
Autism Games: Joint Attention and Reciprocity
Why is joint attention a pivotal skill in autism?
Tony Charman

Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2003 February 28; 358(1430): 315–324. UPDATED POST FROM 9/2008

Resources for the (therapeutic) use of digital and multimedia storytelling and social stories for children and teens...

One of the most popular posts on this blog is  Interactive Multimedia for Social Skills, Understanding Feelings, Relaxation, and Coping Strategies.  If you are interested in this topic, check out the extensive resources, which I'm in the process of updating. Below are some resources and links for those of you who are interested in digital multimedia story telling or digital social stories with young people. Although some of the resources are specific to children or teens with autism spectrum disorders, I've also included information that is appropriate for use in regular classroom settings. 


Digital Storytelling and 21st Century Skills (pdf)
This nine-page primer is useful for anyone interested in learning how to create digital stories or develop digital storytelling activities with young people. The information was provided by David Jakes, an instructional technology coordinator for Community High School District 99 in Downers Grove, IL, provides a good case for digital storytelling and an outline of the process of implementing related activities at the high school level. David Jakes has a website, Jakesonline.org, that contains additional resources about digital storytelling, including strategies for instruction. The website also provide information about collaborative tools and a collection of extensive web resources.
Center for Digital Storytelling
USING MULTIMEDIA SOCIAL STORIES TO INCREASE APPROPRIATE SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT IN YOUNG CHILDREN WITH AUTISM pdf
Selda Ozdemir, Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology, July 2008, V7(3)
Encouraging Positive Behavior with Social Stories: An Intervention for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders pdf   Shannon Crozier, Nancy M.Sileo Teaching Exceptional Children, July/August 2005 pp. 26-31 This article provides information that supports a systematic method of implenting social stories that is integrated into a student's Functional Behavioral Assessment and IEP.


Process: 
• Team identifies the need for behavior intervention.
• Functional assessment is completed.
• Social stories included in behavior plan.
• Social story is written.
• Social story is introduced and progress is monitored with data.
• Success is evaluated with data.
An evaluation of the integrated use of a multimedia storytelling system within a psychotherapy intervention for adolescents. (pdf)
"This paper explores the use of multimedia stories in psychotherapy and mental health service delivery with teenagers. It describes a study currently being conducted with adolescents attending the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service at the Mater Hospital Dublin, Ireland measuring the effectiveness of a therapeutic group work intervention for adolescents experiencing depression, anxiety and other mental health issues. The intervention is essentially a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) programme that uses an animated story building system in combination with a series of short movie vignettes to help clients develop their own coping skills, express their experiences creatively and increase their ability to communicate their emotions effectively."


Current Autism Research on Social Stories (Vol 2, Issue 8; August 2007) Positively Autism
Multitimedia Instruction of Social Skills  (CITEd Research Center- Center for Implementing Technology in Education: Multimedia Technologies) This link provides extensive information about on-line resources for programs that simulate social interaction. It also includes information about the use of social stories with students, and resources for putting together multimedia social stories. Included are some summaries of research about multimedia social stories and the use of multimedia for instructional activities. Be sure to explore the rest of the CITEd site when you have the time.


Scott Bellini is a psychologist who focuses on video modeling. He is the director of Access Autism:
Bellini, S., Akullian, J., & Hopf, A. (2007). Increasing social engagement in young children with autism spectrum disorders using video self-modeling. School Psychology Review, 36, 80-90. 
Bellini, S. & Akullian, J. (2007). A meta-analysis of video modeling and video self-modeling interventions for children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders. Exceptional Children, 73, 261-284.
RELATED
Post: Special issue on Multimedia, Media Convergence, and Digital Storytelling
Digital Stories Targeting Social Skills for Children with Disabilities. Cori More (PRO-ED Journal, 2008)
Digtal/Multimedia Storytelling from A Storied Career: Kathy Hansen's Blog to explore traditional and postmodern forms/uses of storytelling
Digital Storytelling - Katie Christo's Wiki - how-to, resources, tutorials, rubrics, lesson plans, digital storytelling across the curriculum, etc.
The Story-Centered Curriculum - eLearn Magazine
Mind Reading: An Interactive Guide to Reading Emotions
Mind Habits: The Stress Relief Game

SMARTTable Special Report
VITA: Visual Thinking in Autism, Georgia Tech