Marketlink Team Members Pitch in to Help Beecroft Learning Centre
Beecroft Learning Centre is a non-profit facility providing a comprehensive treatment and education program for children with autism aged 4 to 12. One of the cornerstones of Beecroft's innovative day program is the use of "independent activity schedules". Small, photo based learning aids, activity schedules act like a "to do" list for children with autism. Often severely challenged by language comprehension issues, the photo based schedules allow them to be guided by photos through a sequence of activities, teaching them to complete challenging tasks with maximum independence.
Traditionally, activity schedules are eight to fifteen photos long, and are composed of small 2 inch-square photos laminated and affixed to binder pages by Velcro. Photo management can be a challenging task to the instructors at Beecroft. With each child maintaining an inventory of 100+ small laminated photos, photos were inevitably being lost or destroyed. As the children increased their use of schedules, increasingly valuable instructor time was being lost to laminating and building the bulky photo based activity schedules in heavy three-ring binders.
Dan and Sam hard at work with Bee-Agenda.
Marketlink and Beecroft worked together to devise an innovative way to employ personal digital assistants as a better and faster way of delivering activity schedules. With the custom software developed by Mike and Steve, each hand-held contains hundreds of photos, allowing each child to rapidly access photos as needed. The software application provided enhancements over the paper based system, such as voice and text to accompany the photos, accelerating the learning process even more!
The electronic activity schedules, though, brought one additional benefit that Beecroft's management team, Shayna Guenther and Erla Juravsky, never anticipated for the typically aloof child with autism: "coolness".
"When one of our learners brought his digital activity schedule to school, he was surrounded by other typical children who wanted to join in", says Shayna, Beecroft's Education Director. "And that is an extraordinary accomplishment!"
For additional information, please contact:
Jeff Chapleau
(416) 260-2800 ext. 229
E-mail: jchapleau@marketlinksolutions.com
Website: www.marketlinksolutions.com
Marketlink Team Members Pitch in to Help Beecroft Learning Centre
Beecroft Learning Centre is a non-profit facility providing a comprehensive treatment and education program for children with autism aged 4 to 12. One of the cornerstones of Beecroft's innovative day program is the use of "independent activity schedules". Small, photo based learning aids, activity schedules act like a "to do" list for children with autism. Often severely challenged by language comprehension issues, the photo based schedules allow them to be guided by photos through a sequence of activities, teaching them to complete challenging tasks with maximum independence.
Traditionally, activity schedules are eight to fifteen photos long, and are composed of small 2 inch-square photos laminated and affixed to binder pages by Velcro. Photo management can be a challenging task to the instructors at Beecroft. With each child maintaining an inventory of 100+ small laminated photos, photos were inevitably being lost or destroyed. As the children increased their use of schedules, increasingly valuable instructor time was being lost to laminating and building the bulky photo based activity schedules in heavy three-ring binders.
Dan and Sam hard at work with Bee-Agenda.
Marketlink and Beecroft worked together to devise an innovative way to employ personal digital assistants as a better and faster way of delivering activity schedules. With the custom software developed by Mike and Steve, each hand-held contains hundreds of photos, allowing each child to rapidly access photos as needed. The software application provided enhancements over the paper based system, such as voice and text to accompany the photos, accelerating the learning process even more!
The electronic activity schedules, though, brought one additional benefit that Beecroft's management team, Shayna Guenther and Erla Juravsky, never anticipated for the typically aloof child with autism: "coolness".
"When one of our learners brought his digital activity schedule to school, he was surrounded by other typical children who wanted to join in", says Shayna, Beecroft's Education Director. "And that is an extraordinary accomplishment!"
For additional information, please contact:
Jeff Chapleau
(416) 260-2800 ext. 229
E-mail: jchapleau@marketlinksolutions.com
Website: www.marketlinksolutions.com