Good Morning on World Autism Awareness Day!
This blog will be pretty brief but I wanted to write a post to mark this important day for the autism community, and to mark my support by Lighting Up Blue! For more about the day and the Light It Up Blue initiative have a look at the Autism Speaks website, and do consider liking the relevant Facebook page.
I also wanted to reproduce here, with kind permission from the author, some comments sent to me in an email by a parent of a young boy with autism, on her experience of introducing her son to an iPad. I don’t want anyone to rush out and buy this expensive tech based on this evidence – obviously not everyone would find it useful – but I am delighted to have further support for the approach we’re adopting in Click-East. It is fantastic to think that our research is relevant to the daily experience of parents, and has the potential to make a real difference:
“My 2.5 year old son is on the autism spectrum and is currently pre-verbal. It is difficult to engage him in “traditional” forms of learning i.e. books, matching games with cards etc. However, a few months ago, he was introduced to the iPad and I was amazed by how intuitive he found the touch-screen technology and how engaged he was with the learning apps on there.
Before using an iPad, my son would not point to anything – he physically couldn’t isolate his finger. But using the iPad has taught him that he needs to use pointing and not his whole hand and now he can point to objects and pictures in books/posters and will take great pleasure in pointing things out to us!
For the first time, I see my son engaging with learning type activities on the iPad and he really enjoys the matching games on iPad and we have been using these to help him with colours, shapes, animals etc.”
As always with my blog, comments are closed as I don’t have time to audit the site, but if you have any thing to add please don’t hesitate to get in touch using my details on the right hand side of the page. Thanks!
