Technology Tools for Students With Autism: Innovations that Enhance Independence and Learning - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1598572628 ISBN 13: 9781598572629

Publisher: Brookes Publishing, 2013

Synopsis

Technology holds great promise for helping students with autism learn, communicate, and function effectively in the modern world. Start leveraging that power today with this forward-thinking book, your in-depth guided tour of technologies that support learners with autism and help them fully participate in their classroom and community. You'll learn about readily available technologies you can use right now—from apps to video modeling—and explore next-wave innovations that will help shape the future of autism intervention, such as therapeutic robots and advanced virtual reality technologies. You'll also get critical guidance on how to select the appropriate technology for your needs, weave technology into a universal design for learning framework, and conduct effective professional development so teachers make the most of new tools and strategies.

DISCOVER TECHNOLOGIES THAT HELP

• support the overall learning of children on the autism spectrum
• teach social skills and support emotion regulation through independent data collection
• develop executive function strategies and improve flexibility, memory, and transitions
• boost literacy and language skills
• support young adults' transition to the workplace
• make data collection and program evaluation more effective and efficient
• strengthen teacher training programs
• enhance use of evidence-based practices

Explore the benefits of technologies like

• apps for education, communication, behavior regulation, and more
• video modeling
• language processing software
• customized digital stories and book creator apps
• element cue supports
• emotional regulation and sensing technologies
• interactive learning software to improve feedback and metacognition
• visualization and mind mapping apps
• text-to-speech and speech to text software
• e-readers and tablets with integrated multimedia (e.g., cameras, microphones, etc.)
• electronic data collection forms for use with handheld devices
• and more

About this title

About the Author:

Brooke Ingersoll, Ph.D., BCBA, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Michigan State University, 105B Psychology Building, East Lansing, Michigan 48824. Dr. Ingersoll is an assistant professor at Michigan State University, where she heads the Autism Research Laboratory. Her research is focused on social-communication development and interventions aimed at improving social-communication deficits in children with autism. She is a licensed psychologist and a Board Certified Behavior Analyst.

Julie A. Kientz, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the department of Human Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington. Dr. Kientz’s primary research areas are in the fields of human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, and health informatics. She directs the Computing for Healthy Living and Learning Lab, which focuses on designing, developing, and evaluating future computing applications in the domains of health and education. In particular, Dr. Kientz has worked on designing and evaluating mobile, sensor, and collaborative applications for people with sleep disorders, parents of young children, and individuals with autism. Her primary research methods involve human-centered design, technology development, and a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods.

Corinna E. Lathan, PE, Ph.D., is the founder of AnthroTronix, an engineering product development company including the AT KidSystems brand, which develops computer interfaces and educational software for children with disabilities. She is also the founder of Keys to Empowering Youth, a science and technology mentoring program for junior high school girls, and a board member of Engineering World Health, which supports the emergence of health care technology in the developing world. Dr. Lathan was a governor appointee to the Task Force on the Universal Design for Learning, whose work led to Maryland’s State Department of Education Regulation 13A.03.06. Dr. Lathan received her B.A. in biopsychology and mathematics from Swarthmore College and an S.M. in aeronautics and astronautics and Ph.D. in neuroscience from MIT.

Minna Levine, Ph.D., OTR/L, President of SymTrend, has a B.S. in occupational therapy from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in psychology from Brandeis University. She was principal or coinvestigator on three small-business research grants from the National Institute of Mental Health for the development of electronic diary software for use by teens with Asperger syndrome and their caregivers and by professionals and families doing behavioral observations with young children with autism. Dr. Levine works with researchers and clinicians developing self-monitoring tools for individuals with chronic pain, neurological issues, depression, and anxiety.

Dorothy Lucci, M.Ed., CAGS, has over 30 years’ experience in the field of autism and is a national consultant specializing in program design and inclusion of individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. She has conducted research at Boston University Medical Center and the University of Connecticut, been Director of the Autism Support Center, and worked as a school psychologist and general and special education teacher. Currently, she is Director of Aspire, a program at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. She is a consultant to SymTrend and a member of the Board of Directors of the Asperger’s Association of New England. Her publications are in academic journals, the ASQ Quarterly, and a book chapter in The Exceptional Brain (Obler & Fein, Eds., Guilford Press, 1988). In 2007 she was nominated to Marquis Who’s Who in American Education. In 2010 she was a senior investigator at the Mind and Life Summer Research Institute: Education, studying Developmental Neuroscience and Contemplative Practices: Questions, Challenges and Opportunities.

Katharina I. Boser, Ph.D., received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Cornell University in developmental psychology and cognitive science and wrote her dissertation about the early development of child language. She completed postdoctoral work at the University of Maryland studying language rehabilitation using computing technologies for patients with aphasia. In 2000, she joined the research faculty at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Cognitive Neurology, where until 2005 she studied language training with low-verbal subjects and cognition (number representation, memory, and visual attention) in children with autism. She has conducted research on social robots and is involved in usability research with technology companies developing computer software for use with children with autism and other cognitive and/or learning issues. She was a board member and later cochair of the Innovative Technologies for Autism initiative for Autism Speaks until 2011. Dr. Boser is president of Individual Differences in Learning, an educational nonprofit in Maryland that provides professional development to teachers and parents regarding brain-based teaching techniques and innovative technologies for students with a range of cognitive impairments, including autism and twice exceptionality. She presents at many national and international conferences on autism technology research and cognition and advocates for universal design for learning and 21st century learning and teaching at state and national levels. Since the fall of 2011, she has been a technology coordinator for the Glenelg Country School in Ellicott City, Maryland.

Matthew S. Goodwin, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Northeastern University with joint appointments in the Bouvé College of Health Sciences and College of Computer & Information Science, where he coadministers a new doctoral program in personal health informatics. He is a visiting assistant professor and the former director of clinical research at the MIT Media Lab. Goodwin serves on the executive board of the International Society for Autism Research, is chair of the Autism Speaks Innovative Technology for Autism initiative, and has adjunct associate research scientist appointments at Brown University. Goodwin has over 15 years of research and clinical experience at the Groden Center working with children and adults on the autism spectrum and developing and evaluating innovative technologies for behavioral assessment and intervention, including telemetric physiological monitors, accelerometry sensors, and digital video and facial recognition systems. He received his B.A. in psychology from Wheaton College and his M.A. and Ph.D., both in experimental psychology, from the University of Rhode Island. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in affective computing in the Media Lab in 2010.

Sarah C. Wayland, Ph.D., is a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Study of Language and a faculty affiliate in the Special Education Program in the College of Education. She has worked on issues pertaining to language for over 25 years, first at Brandeis University, where she earned a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology, and then at Northeastern University, the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and now at the University of Maryland College Park. She was not in academia for all that time; for over a decade she worked in industry designing those annoying telephone voice systems everyone loves to yell at.

Active in the local disability community, she has helped organize numerous conferences designed to help parents and professionals learn more about ways to help their children with disabilities. She is on the executive committee of the Individual Differences in Learning Association and has been a board member of the Special Education Citizens' Advisory Committee of Prince George's County, Maryland, since 2007. She comoderates GT-Special, an international Listserv for parents of twice-exceptional children (children who are both gifted and learning disabled), and is a member of the Gifted and Talented with Learning Disabilities (GT/LD) Network. She is also a Parents' Place of Maryland PEP (Parents Encouraging Parents) leader of Prince George's County, Maryland.

Dr. Wayland lives with her wonderful husband and their two fabulous boys in Riverdale Park, Maryland.

Gregory D. Abowd, D.Phil., is Regents’ and Distinguished Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received the degrees of M.Sc. and D.Phil. in computation from the University of Oxford. Dr. Abowd leads a research group interested in human-centered applications of mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies, with an emphasis on home and health. He was a leader in establishing the importance of computing technology to address a variety of challenges linked to autism and has published widely on this topic and assisted in the development of commercial solutions. He is Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). In 2009, he was awarded the ACM Eugene Lawler Humanitarian Award for his research efforts.

Rosa I. Arriaga, Ph.D., is a developmental psychologist in the School of Interactive Computing and Director of Pediatric Research for the Health Systems Institute at Georgia Institute of Technology. Her emphasis is on using psychological theory and methods to address fundamental topics of human-computer interaction. Current research interests in the area of health include how technology and crowd sourcing can aid individuals with autism spectrum disorders and their caregivers, how mobile solutions can improve chronic care management, and how lab-based technologies can be scaled and deployed to broaden their impact.

Emma Ashwin, Ph.D., received her undergraduate degree in psychology at the University of Cambridge in 2003 and subsequently began work as a research assistant at the Autism Research Centre (ARC) in Cambridge, England. She then completed a Ph.D. in the ARC, investigating fetal hormonal effects on social and emotional development and the effects on later brain function and structure. She is currently a research scientist at Bath University, England.

Simon Baron-Cohen, Ph.D., Director of the Autism Research Centre (ARC) in Cambridge, England, is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. He holds degrees in Human Sciences from New College, Oxford, a Ph.D. in Psychology from University College, London, and an M.Phil. in Clinical Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry. He is Director of the Cambridge Lifespan Asperger Syndrome Service, a clinic for adults with suspected autism. He is author or editor of numerous books for both scholarly audiences and parents and teachers and is author of the DVDROM Mind Reading, nominated for a BAFTA for Best Off-Line Learning. He is also editor-in-chief of the online open access journal Molecular Autism. He has received awards from the American Psychological Association, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and the British Psychological Society for his research into autism, which currently is focused on testing the “extreme male brain†theory. He has been president of the Psychology Section of the BA and vice president of the International Society for Autism Research as well as the National Autistic Society.

Katharine P. Beals, Ph.D., holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Chicago and worked for 5 years as a senior software engineer in the Natural Language group of Unisys Corporation before joining the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and Drexel University School of Education. Her research interests include language acquisition, educational software, and the education of children with autism. She has presented posters at the Autism Association of America and International Meeting for Autism Research conferences and has published articles and book chapters on computational linguistics, pragmatics, and autism. She is also the architect of the GrammarTrainer software program, a comprehensive English grammar curriculum for children on the autistic spectrum, as well as the author of Raising a Left-Brain Child in a Right-Brain World (Shambhala, 2009), a book that addresses issues facing children with autism who are in educational settings. Finally, she is the parent of a 16-year-old boy on the autistic spectrum.

Bonnie Beers, M.A., earned her B.A. in English literature and secondary education from Duke University, and her M.A. in special education from The George Washington University. She has taught students with learning disabilities and was the high school division director for the Multiple Learning Needs program for students with developmental disabilities at Ivymount School in Rockville, Maryland. She is currently the secondary coordinator of the Model Asperger Program, where she is also in charge of curriculum development for middle and high school. She has taught courses and given countless presentations in the areas of literacy, math, language, and emotion management.

Chris Bendel earned his B.M. in music, concentrating in education, at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has been at Ivymount School in Rockville, Maryland, for 5 years, 4 as a teacher in the classroom, and most recently serving as educational and assistive technology specialist. His research interests include finding ways to leverage technology to meet the needs of all types of learners, both functionally and academically, and finding effective ways to incorporate technology into a universal design for learning framework. He strives to find ways to connect students to the lessons and supports they require in and outside of the classroom to help encourage “always-on†learning.

p>Alise Brann, Ed.S., Research Analyst at AIR, has more than a decade of experience in educational and assistive technology. Her current project for the Center for Technology Implementation is PowerUp WHAT WORKS, which focuses on advancing teaching and learning through technology in inclusive classrooms. She has written several online articles including, “Students with Disabilities in Charter Schools,†“Using Technology to Support Struggling Students in Science,†“Captioned Media: Literacy Support for Diverse Learners,†an “Ask the Tech Expert†column, and a chapter in Breakthrough Teaching and Learning: How Educational and Assistive Technologies Are Driving Innovation (Gray & Silver-Paculla, eds., Springer, 2011). She received her Ed.S. in assistive technology and her M.S. Ed. in special education from Simmons College in Boston.

Jed R. Brubaker, M.A., is a Ph.D. candidate in informatics at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on social computing and human-computer interaction. He holds an M.A. in communication, culture, and technology from Georgetown University and a B.S. in psychology from the University of Utah.

Christopher R. Bugaj, M.A., CCC-SLP, is a founding member of the Assistive Technology Team for Loudoun County Public Schools in Virgini...

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Classroom-Based Technology Tools

About this edition

• Publisher: Brookes Publishing
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1598572628
• ISBN 13: 9781598572629
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 376
• Editor: Katharina I. Boser, Matthew S. Goodwin, Sarah C. Wayland