5 Apps designed to help children with special needs / autism

With the release of Apple’s Ipad, came newly designed educational apps for babies, toddlers and students. Another area that has been developing quickly is app development for children with special needs. These apps have been creating quite the buzz in special needs parenting communities. It has really been a blessing for parents to be able to use apps in order to help their children express their needs. Parenting is challenging as it is and even more so when you have a child in the special needs realm. Following are five apps that cater to these children.

1. First Then Visual Schedule

A winner for children with Autism. Designed to to provide positive behavior support for those with communication needs. Also great for children with language delays or developmental issues. Facilitates moving from one daily activity to the next and overall dealing with changing daily schedules.

2. Sentence Builder

Designed to help children learn how to build grammatically correct sentences in a creative and fun way. Especially beneficial for autistic children struggling with communicating ideas. Focuses on the connector words which make up over 80% of the English language such as “the”, “an”, a, etc. User. Very user-friendly interface that uses animations (100 pictures) and audio clips with optional correct sentence audio re-enforcement. And one of the best parts is that the sentence can be different each time! Really wonderful app.

3. Model Me Going Places

Based on the Model Me Going Places, DVD, this behavioral modeling app is designed to help children navigate challenging locations in the community such as the hairdressers, Mall, Doctor, Playground, etc.. Especially useful for children with Autism who usually are comfortable at home in a familiar setting but once outside can easily breakdown. It offers parents a user friendly mobile solution to help them with their children when they are out. The social stories are easy to follow and appeal succesfully to autistic children who by nature are very visual.

4. Proloquo2Goâ„¢
Ok this is an expensive one ($189.99) but it is the AAC (Augmentative and alternative communication) device in your pocket! AAC devices range anywhere from $350.00 – $1000.00. Proloquo2Goâ„¢ provides a full featured communication solution for people who have difficulty speaking with many wonderful features such as natural sounding text-to-speech voices, , a default vocabulary of over 7000 items, and , powerful automatic conjugations. Many rate it as superior to current devices in its category.

5. ArtikPix

A wonderful speech therapy tool, Artpix is an fun, engaging articulation app for children with speech and sound delays. It makes ordinary articulation drills exciting. Children tap and flick cards to practice sounds using fun activities. There are 14 decks – (th, f, v, ch, sh, k, g, s, z, l, r, s-blends, l-blends, and r-blends) with 40 cards in each for a total of 560 cards. The flashcard and matching activities include the following features:

• color coded cards
• auto-play of audio recordings
• tap-to-play audio
• record your voice and play the voice recording
• collect data by tallying
• tallies automatically convert to percentage based data
• save the data
• flashcard reordering
• options for matching cards to hide or remain on the screen after matching
• copy data to clipboard, email, and Google Spreadsheet

Only available for Ipad but hoping to see a version for iphone and itouch soon.

It’s really great to see app development play a major part in the realm of special needs. There are just 5 but if you do a google search you can find so many more for different purposes.