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Alphabetic skills refer to the awareness of the sounds that make spoken words, as well as the letters that correspond to those sounds. This includes phonics and phonemic awareness instruction. Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the sounds that make up spoken words. Phonics refers to the relationship between written letters and sounds. Alphabetics encompasses key skills required to become a proficient reader.

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Common Characteristics, Challenges, or Barriers

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Common Characteristics, Challenges, or Barriers

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Children with autism can be slower to develop alphabetic skills than other children due to the nature of the disability.

They also tend to overgeneralize the rules or are slower to learn the exceptions, resulting in odd pronunciation.

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HearBuilder is an online literacy program that helps students with following directions, phonological awareness, sequencing, and auditory memory skills. It also improves literacy skills in the areas of listening, memory, and comprehension. Through the use of highly-engaging, multi-level activities designed to support Common Core Standards, HearBuilder would be a great tool to help students with ASD build on foundational literacy skills of listening and memory.

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HearBuilder software builds following directions, phonemic awareness, sequencing, and auditory memory skills.

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Helpful Technology #2 - Explode the Code

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Helpful Technology #2 - Explode the Code

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Explode the Code is an online phonics instruction program that provides highly-engaging, data-driven phonics curriculum to grades K-4. This program would be beneficial to students with ASD in learning alphabetic skills as it offers research-based instruction that is reinforcement based and data-driven. Ongoing progress monitoring occurs throughout the program.

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Break through the code with online, data-driven phonics instruction!

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Helpful Technology #3 - iSpy Phonics App

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Helpful Technology #3 - iSpy Phonics App

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iSpy Phonics App allows users to match sounds with the letters of the alphabet, including four additional consonant sounds, through a game of "I Spy". Each sound is illustrated individually with a picture paired for further understanding and visualization. This app would be beneficial for students with ASD to promote alphabetic skills as it has the option for users to add pictures that are relevant to the individual making learning letters and sounds more meaningful.

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Match phonic sounds with letters, through colorful illustrations, pictures and accurate pronunciation, while playing the age old game of I Spy. It provides a fun and highly interactive way to help children learn to recognize letters and their phonic sounds. iSpy Phonics allows children to match phonic sounds with letters, through illustrations, pictures, and accurate pronunciation while playing the game of I Spy.

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Match phonic sounds with letters, through colorful illustrations, pictures and accurate pronunciation, while playing the age old game of I Spy. It provides a fun and highly interactive way to help children learn to recognize letters and their phonic sounds.

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Vocabulary skills refer to the understanding of what words mean and how to use them appropriately in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Vocabulary skills are required for children to understand what they read and also to decode unknown words seen in text.

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Common Characteristics, Challenges, or Barriers

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Common Characteristics, Challenges, or Barriers

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Many children with autism have hyperlexia, which is an “intense focus or preoccupation with numbers or letters, the early and spontaneous ability to read words, and a significant gap between word-level decoding and comprehension”. Despite demonstrating adequate fluency skills, these children are often not understanding what they are reading.

Children with autism also may have limited exposure to oral language, and therefore limited vocabulary, as a result of limited socialization and/or restricted and repetitive interests.

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Helpful Technology #1 - Real Vocabulary App

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Helpful Technology #1 - Real Vocabulary App

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The Real Vocabulary app is a language program designed by a speech and language pathologist for children in grades K-5. It focuses on vocabulary included in the core curriculum. This app would be useful for students with ASD  as it allows users to add their own words, pictures, and audio-recordings to support vocabulary, allowing for a more individualized experience.

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The Real Vocabulary app is a comprehensive and flexible language program for kindergarten-5th grade students targeting core curriculum vocabulary. The Real Vocabulary app includes over 1500 pictures and over 5000 pre-recorded audio. The pro version of the app and the All Words in - app program allow the users to add their own words, pictures and audio recordings, making therapy more individualized and allowing school speech therapists to add their own curriculum based vocabulary.

The Real Vocabulary app offers both receptive and expressive tasks in the following categories:

Antonyms (Kindergarten - 1st grade, 2nd- 3rd grades, 4th - 5th grades with total of 300 antonyms)

Synonyms (Kindergarten - 1st grade, 2nd- 3rd grades, 4th - 5th grades with total of 300 synonyms)

Definitions (Kindergarten - 1st grade, 2nd- 3rd grades, 4th - 5th grades with total of 300 definitions)

Multiple Meanings (Kindergarten - 1st grade, 2nd- 3rd grades, 4th - 5th grades with total of 300 multiple meanings)

Idioms (Kindergarten - 1st grade, 2nd- 3rd grades, 4th - 5th grades with total of 300 idioms)

In the receptive task, the picture with word stimulus is displayed and the student matches one of the four words that matches the stimulus. (E.g. what is another word for accurate? A) Happy B) Late C) True D) Correct)

In the expressive task, the picture with word stimulus is displayed and the student states his answer verbally (E.g. what is another word for almost?)

The pro version of the app and the ALL words in- app program include all the above categories however each category can be purchased separately as well. The users can try the free light version of the app with a few examples of each category and activity.

Students will be motivated to learn and practice thousands of words since they will be rewarded with three different games:

The Real Vocabulary app is easy to navigate and allows users to employ several tools to perform the following:

add additional photos and audio recording

enter multiple students

change settings

save selected targets for the next session

select auto-scoring

select alternate counts for multiple students

enable or disable written picture descriptions

enable or disable special effect sounds

audio record users' responses

track correct and incorrect responses

view reports in table and graphical forms

e-mail results at the end of the game

Author: Jennifer Rogers, M.A. CCC-SLP
Developed by: Virtual Speech Center

Connection to Common Core Standards

Antonyms (K-5)

Synonyms (K-5)

Definitions (K-5)

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.12345.4 Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases based on grade level reading and content , choosing flexibly from an array of strategies.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.1.5b words by category and by one or more key attributes (e.g., a is a bird that swims; a duck is a large cat with stripes).tiger

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.3.6 Acquire and use accurately grade-appropriate conversational, general academic, and domain-specific words and phrases, including those that signal spatial and temporal relationships (e.g., After dinner that night we went looking for them ).

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.4.6 Acquire and use accurately grade-appropriate general academic and domain-specific words and phrases, including those that signal precise actions, emotions, or states of being (e.g., quizzed, whined, stammered) and that are basic to a particular topic (e.g., wildlife, conservation, and when discussing animal preservation).endangered

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.3.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, distinguishing literal from nonliteral language.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.2.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases in a text relevant to a grade 2 topic or subject area.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.345.4 Determine the meaning of general academic and domain-specific words and phrases in a text relevant to a grade level topic or subject area .

Multiple Meanings (K-5)

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.K.4 Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases based on kindergarten reading and content

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.K.4a Identify new meanings for familiar words and apply them accurately (e.g., knowingduck is a bird and learning the verb to ).duck

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.12345.4 Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases based on grade level reading and content , choosing flexibly from an array of strategies.

Idioms (3-5)

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.3.5a Distinguish the literal and nonliteral meanings of words and phrases in context (e.g., take steps ).

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.3.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, distinguishing literal from nonliteral language.

This app has so much to offer! With the ability to customize and control setting and words for students, targets for key vocal areas, fun games, and awesome data collection you can't go wrong! The Speech Bubble

What I really like about this app: The depth and scope of this app which allows so many different aspects of vocabulary to be targeted. The ability to add your own words and notes. Nikki Heyman,SLP

I love the fact that this app addresses many semantic flexibility targets found in common language and vocabulary tests (e.g., Word Tests Elementary and Adolescent, CELF-5, etc). The wide range of ages and grades makes it easy to adjust and edit vocabulary for the student's level and needs. The app's data collection tools are great for tracking goal mastery. The recording feature also allows the student to hear and judge the quality of own responses in order to make the necessary adjustments. Tatyana Elleseff MA CCC-SLP

TheraPlatform is the best in class HIPAA-compliant practice management and teletherapy software designed for speech and language therapists. Our software includes therapy notes, billing, client portal, e-claim submission and telepractice.

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The Real Vocabulary app is a comprehensive and flexible language program for kindergarten-5th grade students targeting core curriculum vocabulary. The Real Vocabulary app includes over 1500 pictures and over 5000 pre-recorded audio.

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Helpful Technology #2 - Sentence Workout App

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Helpful Technology #2 - Sentence Workout App

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Sentence Workout App was created by a certified speech and language pathologist for children ages 6 and up to help practice sentence structures in oral and written form. This would be a beneficial tool for students with ASD as not only is it highly engaging, colorful, and motivating, but it also allows students to say the words in the sentence orally, record themselves to hear it back, and build their own sentences using the learned vocabulary.

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The Sentence Workout was created by a certified speech and language pathologist for students ages 6 and up to practice sentence structures in both oral and written forms. This is another app from the family of workouts developed by Virtual Speech Center Inc.-this time with a soccer theme. Children are welcomed by the soccer coach who encourages them to work hard. Children earn a soccer ball for each correct response, and when they accumulate enough balls, they can play a soccer game.

The two activity types included in Sentence Workout are "say it" and "build your sentence."

Say It

In the "say it" activity, students practice sentence structure by answering questions orally. Students can audio record their responses and compare them with the native productions.

Build Sentence

In the "build your sentence" activity, students practice written sentence structure by manipulating sentence parts while they are receiving auditory feedback. Children simply drag and drop different scrambled parts of the sentence into correct boxes to make a complete and grammatically correct sentence. They can then listen to their sentences and correct them as needed.

Children are welcomed by the soccer coach who encourages them to work hard. Children earn a soccer ball for each correct response, and when they accumulate enough balls, they can play a soccer game.

There is a wide variety of sentence structures included in the app. It will be a great way to practice these skills. Right now I use the No Glamour Sentence Structure book and the app Rainbow Sentences. I love having more activities for this skill! Speech Room News

With a hierarchy of sentence structure types to practice, this application can be used across multiple ages/grades, with multiple students, and as children individually progress. To learn more about how this application, continue reading! Consonantly Speaking

This app uses a fun soccer theme. I don't know about you but about 80% of my students are OBSESSED with soccer! So yay! Speech Time Fun

Similar Apps

TheraPlatform is the best in class HIPAA-compliant practice management and teletherapy software designed for speech and language therapists. Our software includes therapy notes, billing, client portal, e-claim submission and telepractice.

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Sentence Workout was created by a certified speech and language pathologist for students ages 6 and up to practice sentence structures in both oral and written forms. This is another app from the family of workouts developed by Virtual Speech Center Inc.-this time with a soccer theme.

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Helpful Technology #3 - Words with Edudadoo: Games that Teach

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Helpful Technology #3 - Words with Edudadoo: Games that Teach

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Edudadoo app consists of educational games that focus on speech, vocabulary, and creativity of early learning communication skills. This app would be beneficial for students with ASD to learn vocabulary as parents can take pictures of pets, people, and familiar objects to introduce and teach vocabulary, as well as build on known vocabulary through fun stories and activities.

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Fluency refers to the ability to read a text accurately and effortlessly in a way that is both expressive and meaningful. Reading fluently requires the reader to hold previously recognized and understood words in their memory while continuing to read, allowing the them to create meaningful phrases before they speak them. This skill is only possible when decoding words has become automatic.

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Common Characteristics, Challenges, or Barriers

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Common Characteristics, Challenges, or Barriers

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Children with autism often display slower reading patterns, reading word by word, as they do not have the extensive understanding of the words that are being read to demonstrate fluency.

As children with autism try to read, all of their cognitive capacity is focused on trying to sound out each word, which doesn’t allow them to integrate the words into meaningful phrases.

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Helpful Technology #1 - Stories2Learn App

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Helpful Technology #1 - Stories2Learn App

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Stories2Learn app allows users to create personalized stories using pictures, texts, and audio messages, which can be used to promote literacy and communication skills.
This app would be beneficial to students with ASD as it allows teachers, clinicians, or parents to make talking books using pictures from their environment and daily routine of their life. Allowing students to record the books digitally can help promote fluency.

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This app helps autistic kids and other students with social learning challenges by creating personalized social stories with photos, text and audio messages. Stories can be created quicky with a parent or educator and shows concepts such as making eye contact, sharing, schedules in a personalized way.

Although, the benefits to autistic children are the prime focus in this app, I can see it working well for kids with social anxiety and shyness. Being able to role play and see youself dealing with different situations can help children get through uncomfortable situations.

EXPERT OPINION
This app has not been reviewed by BestAppsForKids.com, but was recommended by Shannon Des Roches Rosa, mother to an autistic child and autism writer / advocate. Visit Shannon Des Roches Rosa's blog for more autism insights and app recommendations.

Here's what Shannon Des Roches Rosa has to say about the Stories2Learn autism app.

Social stories help Leo with new transitions, situations, and reinforces challenging routines. I can make a social story in about fifteen minutes, once the pictures are loaded on the iPad.

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kids apps STORIES2LEARN | | BestAppsForKids.com

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This app helps autistic kids and other students with social learning challenges by creating personalized social stories with photos, text and audio messages. Stories can be created quicky with a parent or educator and shows concepts such as making eye contact, sharing, schedules in a personalized way.

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Story Patch app allows users to create their own stories using over 800 illustrations and customizable characters. Story themes can be determined by asking the user a series of questions, making illustrations, importing photos, and sharing the final product with friend via PDF. This app would be beneficial for students with ASD to promote reading fluency as it offers a guided story creation mode to help facilitate the story creation. Final products can be read aloud and shared with friends/family to increase reading fluency.

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I recently had the opportunity to meet with Matt Wymore, the creator of Story Patch, a new storytelling app for the iPad. Story Patch allows kids to create their own stories, either guided by the program or all on their own. After talking with Matt and using the app for over two hours, I came to realize that not only is it a fun and useful program, but it can be used for much more than was originally intended.

On the surface, Story Patch is already a great app. You can create a story, as short or as long as you want, complete with words and images. The program is obviously aimed at kids, but can be fun for grown ups, too. To create a storybook, select "Create a New Story" and choose a path. The right fork will allow you to get to scene creation much sooner, since it helps you put the story together. If you choose to create the story with help, the assisted route is well-scripted. Just choose a template and then answer questions based on the template. The answers are from a list and are not open ended. This doesn't allow for much creativity, but it is easy for kids who aren't as interested in writing. Future plans for the app include more templates and user-submitted templates to share and download.

To help set up the story, Story Patch asks such questions as what kind of a story it is and what happens at key points of the story. Click each of the running lights on this right fork to add another aspect of the story. Once the plot is established, you are put on the first page of the book, ready for scene creation. You can edit the book in portrait or landscape mode. Each orientation has a slightly different look.

If you go the assisted route but don't like the scripted sentences, you're able to edit all of the text once you reach the editing stage. You can also insert and delete pages, and add more pages to the end.

The program has 800+ included images with which to create your scenes. There are so many images that I asked Matt if it was possible to search for an item. I was told that it would be coming in a future release. The images are vector images, so they'll look good at whatever size you use them. There may be future in-app purchases to buy additional packages of images, such as those for holidays or special purposes.

Once you add images to the scene, the images can be rotated, re-sized or moved to the front or back. Any backgrounds you add are automatically placed behind the foreground images, but the background images can be stacked as well. The only problem we ran into with scene arranging happened when we made an image very small, but not so small that it would disappear. When we tried to make it larger again, it was so small our fingers couldn't get close enough to stretch it. Even my son's tiny fingers had trouble enlarging the really small items. Because of this, Matt is considering a future option for enlarging images 2x or 4x, for example. This will probably be accessible by tapping and holding, then choosing a zoom level.

In addition to the included images of people, there is also a option to create your own character. You can create a girl, boy, man or woman. You can change their hair color, skin color, clothing colors, expressions and body positions. Once you've designed one of these characters, the program remembers the last colors you chose for that character type. This allows you to easily add the same character on page after page. If you have two of the same type of character that you want to have recurring in the story, two boys, for example, the best way to handle it would be to design and place one character on all the applicable pages, and then design and place the other character.

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Story Patch: A New Storytelling iPad App for Fun, Education and Sharing

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I recently had the opportunity to meet with Matt Wymore, the creator of Story Patch, a new storytelling app for the iPad. Story Patch allows kids to create their own stories, either guided by the program or all on their own. After talking with Matt and using the app for over two hours, I came [...]

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The Pictello app allows users to create and share visual stories that play the story back. One can add their own pictures, videos, and/or audio recordings, making sharing information easier while simultaneously promoting literacy. This would be a beneficial tool for students with ASD to increase fluency as it offers step-by-step support to create a visual story and allows the text to be read in addition to recording, as listening to stories read aloud also promotes fluency.

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This app is great for people who want maximum flexibility. Out of the box, it has everything for communication and language growth. Yet, if you are an AAC expert, you can tailor it to almost any (accessibility) need.

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Create and share visual social stories and schedules with this app for iOS. Adding your own pictures, videos and recordings to stories you create makes it easier to share information while building literacy skills, as well as confidence in storytelling.

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Text comprehension refers to the reader's ability to think intentionally about what they are reading so they can develop meaning by relating it to what they know; it is understanding what they are reading and putting the information to use. Text comprehension is considered the most dynamic and complex of all reading skills.

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Common Characteristics, Challenges, or Barriers

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Common Characteristics, Challenges, or Barriers

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Children with ASD struggle with shifting their attention from word to sentence level, in addition to connecting words and sentences to create understanding of the text, as well as memory capacity.

Children with ASD also have difficulty creating an organizational structure or schema to facilitate their memory to promote reading comprehension.

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Helpful Technology #1 - Question Builder App

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Helpful Technology #1 - Question Builder App

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Question Builder App is designed to help users learn how to answer abstract questions and create responses based on inference. This would be a helpful tool for students with ASD in assisting with comprehension as the use of audio clips promotes improved auditory processing.

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Posted on: January 12th, 2012 by Kyle |

Question Builder is designed to help elementary aged children learn to answer abstract questions and create responses based on inference. Extensive use of audio clips promotes improved auditory processing for special needs children with autism spectrum disorders or sensory processing disorders. Audio clip reinforcement can be turned on or off for non-special needs children. Question Builder offers a rich and fun environment for improving the ability to abstract.

Features

Why, What, Where, How and Random question formats

1200 audio clips of questions and answers

3 levels of abstraction

Optional text and audio reinforcement

Statistics to track student progress

60 encouragement animations and audio clips

For more information, or to purchase a copy, please visit the iTunes Store..

Tags: iphone apps, iPhone educational software, Question Builder

Posted in Narrative Skills | 1 Comment "

Silvana Freestone

Comment left on: January 18th, 2012 at 11:01 pm

Two suggested improvements to Question builder app: one) need to have audio for nonreader kids so that they can hear selected question answers before selecting which one they believe / hear is best answer to the question and two) after pressing the select button for whichever response child selects-especially the right answer-audio needs to repeat the answer sentance exacly as written, eg. not have audio make conjunctions if written answer uses separate words and not have audio use prepositions instead of actual noun written. Hope these upgrades can be added for nonreaders soon! Thank you for all your great work.

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Question Builder - Mobile Education Store

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Posted on: January 12th, 2012 by Kyle | Question Builder is designed to help elementary aged children learn to answer abstract questions and create responses based on inference. Extensive use of audio clips promotes improved auditory processing for special needs children with autism spectrum disorders or sensory processing disorders.

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Helpful Technology #2 - Sequence It! App

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Helpful Technology #2 - Sequence It! App

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Sequence It! is an app designed to promote the understanding of processes by sequencing images by the order in which they occurred. This is a beneficial comprehension tool for ASD students as putting images in the proper sequence helps users gain a better understanding of cause and effect, processes and series of actions, encouraging literacy, expanding vocabulary, and understanding story event sequences.

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Best app I've ever seen for sequencing for secondary students in speech and language therapy (a very challenging population to find materials for). I would be happy to use this even with adults. I can use the sequences included with the app but, more importantly, I can use my own photos, text, and voice. We can work on putting actions in order, answering qs about them, functional reading, following directions in view mode, etc. I've even been importing pics from how to apps like Snapguide and making sequences for everything from how to make a smoothie to how to take care of a cut, or how to write a check. Wish there was a way to easily print these out to work with them in hand. Other than that, it's perfect.

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sequence it! – create and arrange sequences

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for kids with autism and other special needs

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c.e.t - the center for educational technology

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‎Sequence it! - Create and arrange sequences, for kids with autism and other special needs

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‎Sequence it! is a tool intended for strengthening the understanding of processes based on a sequence of events. A sequence of images is an effective tool and can be used in a variety of educational activities, including: understanding cause and effect, understanding processes and a series of action...

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Helpful Technology #3 - Comprehension Builder App

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Helpful Technology #3 - Comprehension Builder App

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Comprehension Builder is an app is designed to help users develop skills in passage comprehension, working memory, and answering multiple choice questions related to a text through multi-levels and a variety of fictional and nonfictional texts. This app would be beneficial for students with ASD in promoting comprehension skills as it offers incremental learning, meaning new levels will not be unlocked until previous skills are mastered, in addition to rewards that are fun and engaging.

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Description

Comprehension Builder develops skills in passage comprehension, working memory and answering multiple choice questions about a text.

When using "Comprehension Builder", your learner will first read a passage. The learner must then hold the information in memory in order to answer a multiple choice question.

To build sustained attention and working memory, early levels contain 2-sentence texts with limited word count. As comprehension is demonstrated and memory increases, the texts increase in length and difficulty.

"Comprehension Builder" contains 200+ fiction and non-fiction texts on a variety of topics.

This app is perfect for learners who:

- when reading or listening, information seems to 'go in one ear and out the other.'

- have trouble responding to questions about a text unless they can refer back to the text.

- can understand each sentence, but don't seem to put them together to make meaning from the text as a whole.

Additional Features:

- Incremental learning. New levels are unlocked only when your child demonstrates mastery.

- Fun and engaging Reward Center to increase motivation.

- Contains over 600 questions, with content designed by professional teachers and researchers.

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Comprehension Builder develops skills in passage comprehension, working memory and answering multiple choice questions about a text. When using "Comprehension Builder", your learner will first read a passage. The learner must then hold the information in memory in order to answer a multiple choice question.