Many students with autism and other learning disabilities will not receive year around services and will need a powerful environment to maintain and continue learning skills. Video modeling has been shown in numerous studies to improve acquisition rates across a wide variety of tasks for these students. The Activity Trainer (AT) has many activities that relate to academic, daily living, recreation, and social.
The summer is a great opportunity for children with autism and other learning disabilities to interact with other children, play outdoors, or play sports. There are a variety of activities in the AT to support these interactions, and parents and teachers can customize the AT by adapting our activities or creating their own activities to meet the needs of a specific student. There is even a computer based visual schedule to help students independently complete learned skills and activity images can be printed to be used off the computer for activity cuing or visual schedules. Students can learn to, use a knife and fork, tie their shoes, play with a ball, do a high-five, or about 300 other activities!
The AT videos are filmed from the student’s perspective which means the student does not have translate the view into their own perspective. The video can be less intrusive to students because the computer acts as the instructor as opposed to a parent or teacher which can be intimidating. Instead, parents and teachers help students learn by acting as facilitators. The video also reduces or eliminates observational memory issues that prevent a student from watching an activity and then completing the activity. With video modeling, the student can learn to perform the skill in parallel to watching it. This parallel viewing while executing the skill with the facilitation of a parent or teacher can explode the learning rate or even make the difference of learning the skill or not. The AT also provides the individual steps (task analysis) so that skills can be further simplified by first just teaching individual steps and then teaching the steps in sequence.
Using the Activity Trainer as a teaching tool facilitates success in retaining and building Academic, Communication, Daily Living, Nonverbal Imitations, Recreation, Social and Vocational skills.
Parents and teachers can use the data collection features to track student progress. Automatically the AT tracks when, how long, and how presented for each “trial” and you can add the result and associated notes during the trial or afterward.
To see a full list of Activity Trainer Activitiesplease click here
