Joined: 25 Sep 2014 Age: 63 Gender: Male Posts: 929
10 Sep 2016, 6:12 am
Start of school. I wasn't sure how my son would handle a new school. He is in 1st grade now. As it turned out, everything went great. That's a relief. Teachers love him. Even the principal offered to ride the elevator inside the school with Ivan, ha ha.
I learned that "Educreations" is an iPad tool that teachers use at school. Gosh, sometimes there is just a communication breakdown, I guess. Making cartoonish video clips is so much easier with the so-called "whiteboarding" apps. Educreations is not the only whiteboarding app out there. I haven't had the chance to play with other whiteboarding apps, but from playing with Educreations, it does seem to fit the bill for an easy-to-use app to create short video clips for autistic children. Gosh, I wish I had come to know it earlier. I'll keep evaluating other whiteboarding apps, and see which ones are good.
Technology is moving forward, non-stop. Things are becoming easier and easier. There is no excuse for parents not to create animation video clips for their autistic children.
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A friend just told me about this book: "Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism" by Barry M. Prizant. I had to laugh. Here is one paragraph from the book:
"Autism isn't an illness. It's a different way of being human. Children with autism aren't sick; they are progressing through developmental stages as we all do. To help them, we don't need to change or fix them. We need to work to understand them, and then change what we do."
If I didn't know better, I would have thought that that was a paragraph written by me. Ha. So there you go, parents. Catch up if you can.
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The week school started, I had a business trip. When I came home, Ivan asked for my phone. He told me he wanted to make a video. Since I am always the one making animation videos, I thought he wanted *me* to make a video for him. I gave him the phone, but then was busy because my daughter grabbed me to go through some pages of a book with her. There was also a 2-year-old baby cousin in the house. A few minutes later, Ivan showed me his video. Only then did I understand Ivan really meant what he said. He made a video clip, to teach his baby cousin to read. It made my day. In my jargon, Ivan has now fully closed his video "outer feedback loop." So heartwarming, and he is only 6 years old. So here it is:
Joined: 25 Sep 2014 Age: 63 Gender: Male Posts: 929
03 Oct 2016, 5:26 am
After looking and playing around, it seems like "Explain Everything" can do a good job. It's a whiteboarding app, available on both iPad and Android systems.
I use the Android version, it's very buggy, it crashes all the time. But frankly there is no qualified competition out there. So everyone is kind of stuck. It seems like the iPad version might be more stable, from people's comments. I had a chance to try the app on a friend's son. It's amazing how much attention he paid to the app. I let him write, doodle and record his voice at the same time. You get to watch the instant playback. It was priceless to see the boy's happy face. You can export into video clips. If you have Chromecast, you can also cast it onto your big screen TV. I think in the future, when the app becomes more refined and processors become more powerful, whiteboarding apps will become a standard tool for all children, particular for autistic children. Pretty soon, speech and conversational skill problems will be a thing of the past. "Explain Everything" can import images, videos and PDFs. You can write on it. There is also "laser pointer." For geeks, there is also an equation editor.
Recently I had a chance to play with a demo of Microsoft's HoloLens as well. Pretty cool. It's what they call an Augmented Reality (AR) gadget. I can see AR inside children's schools in 5 to 10 years. Technology is moving forward, non-stop. We already live inside the Technological Singularity. A lot of issues in raising autistic children are becoming non-issues. As I always say: catch up if you can.
10 Sep 2016, 6:12 am
