iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch for Students with Severe Disabilities

For students with severe disabilities, apps for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and other handheld devices can be used to provide visual support.  These apps can teach functional skills and focuses on the essentials that students with severe disabilities need such as options to customize both presentation features and content.  If students have difficulties with motor skills or attention deficits, the application should allow changes in response time and methods of response.

In today’s society, the iPod, iPad, or iPhone, are becoming popular in the classroom for visual support.  iPrompts presents a picture-based prompts that are programmed by teachers and parents to help their students stay on task and transition between activities.  This app provides hundreds of photos that can be chosen from but also allows their own pictures to be used.  This can be seen below.

iCommunicate and First-Then are other applications that uses digital photos to create picture schedules, such as past event cards, and gives the option to record a message that can be linked to a picture.  Picture Planner, targeted toward students with cognitive disabilities, construct personal picture schedules on a computer and then can be used on a mobile device or printed.