Using Technology to Create Social Stories for Children: Adobe Voice

In the past, I have written about using social stories to help children with autism or anxiety deal with apprehension about the unknown or future events.  My previous post was about a birthday party, but social stories can be created for your child about ANY theme such as starting school, night-time routine, going to the dentist, or traveling.  The stories can also be created to help kids learn a new skill such as how to say "I'm sorry" or how to introduce yourself to someone new.

I have recently discovered the free app by Adobe called Adobe Voice.  This app can be used to make stories come alive with icons, photographs, text, graphics, and music. 

Here is a link to the video I created about a birthday party: Birthday Social Story

In this story, I used icons, but you can insert pictures of the child's actual world.  For example, for a social story about the first day of school, you can take photos of the actual school, the teacher, the classroom, his/her bookbag, the school bus, etc and make a video story for your child to watch.   Your child can even help create the video themselves.  They could record their own voice talking about the pictures that are uploaded. 


What is your story?

Economic Office Decoration

I guess now that I have been at the same job for 15 years, I should make myself comfortable!  I decided to make my workspace a spot that I could feel more peaceful in, something warm and centering for me while I work. 

The tree decal I ordered from Amazon.com cost about $15 and arrived at my doorstep in two days.  I was thinking it would be a project to figure out how to use one (this was my first) and how to get it up on my walls.  It was super easy and took about 15 minutes.  They are also reuseable and can be re-arranged with some care as needed.

The nice thing about the decal set is that it was composed of separate pieces, so you can arrange the tree however you want.  The picture on the package looks like this:

I decided to wrap it around the room and was able to create the illusion (see above office picture) of the tree growing behind the wall separator.  I also made the branches cluster around the picture frame above.  The frame was a gift from my sister in law a few Christmas' ago.  It has "clothes pins" in each of the 9 frames so you can switch out picture.  I had family pictures up for a long time which was fun.  This time, I gathered pictures of certain colors and made collages of each color on my Pic Stitch app...

Then I saved the collage of each color (e.g., one for green, one for blue, etc) and I used my touchnote app to send myself a postcard of each collage. 

 

 

 

The postcards come on sturdy stock paper with a nice shine.  They do not curl or fold, and they hold up better than actual photo prints.