9th January 2012
In December 2011 the IRIS Magazine ran a technology focus on the Interactive Technology and Games conference at the NottinghamTrent University.
Part of the article focused on the pioneering work by Nottingham City Austism team’s Rachel Tunney where she introduced iPhones and Ipads into classes to help children with their education.
Following a number of requests from parents the IRIS Project is now happy to announce that list of apps are available and can be downloaded here
For your information we have posted the relevant section of the original article below:
Rachel tunney from the Nottingham City Autism team spoke about some pioneering work she was doing to introduce iphones and ipads to schools to help teaching assistants working with children with autism in year 7 at Bluecoat School, working alongside a colleague from the Education Psychology Service.
The TAs were given the devices and 40 “apps” (small programs designed to help with tasks) to use in classes.
The results were positive, with three quarters of assistants rating them very useful and noting that the devices helped them manage their time and helped with the children’s
motivation.
Rachel said: “the teacher might give a talk at the beginning of the lesson and set a task that has ten parts to it. the devices allowed the students the chance to break the tasks down into stages and mark them off.”
Other apps helped children with their pronunciation and speech, and even gave some children the opportunity to communicate in ways they hadn’t before, using symbols to create complex sentences.
In some creative cases TAs had taken photos of sessions which students wouldn’t enter due to anxiety, and by removing the fear of the unknown were able to help the child attend the class.
The only negative was that in some cases children became obsessed with the device. however, all instances of this happening took place early on in the trial and the problem was eliminated when clear boundaries were set.