From AT Apprentice to Novice Film Maker....Possibilities are Endless!!!!

Social Stories - a creative experience!

Having been working in the education field for the past 17 years, I am familiar with Social Stories and their uses for children with Autism, other Learning Disabilities or Challenges and Behavioral difficulties. I have worked on School Planning Teams where we have developed Social Stories, worked and supervised teachers (both classroom and specialist (i.e. Learning Centre) teachers who were using Social Stories. These stories have always been in hard copy. By that I mean that they have been written out on paper, typed up with a typewriter and most technologically advanced for us, typed up and printed out off a computer. However, I have never, that is until today, thought of creating a video of a Social Story to use with a child.....but what a revelation and fabulous idea! The possibilities, yet again are endless with what you can do to create a video Social Story that is relevant and meaningful and one in which the child can actually watch themselves performing the Social Story! Talk about immediate feedback! This would be so exciting and memorable for a child to experience as well as visually stimulating.

In terms of technology and the endless uses in classrooms, not just for students of average abilities, but those with unique needs, we had the opportunity to see how a popular piece of technology can work to support us with this endeavor. We worked with iPod Nanos in class today! This was very exciting and all I kept thinking as I worked with my group (Terri, Darlene and Lorraine) was how we could improve on this product - our video, or how I could use this with so many of the students at my school.

We set to work in our groups on our Mirror scenario - where a student has difficulties when she comes across a mirror. She wants to stand in front of the mirror for about 20 minutes and this can become problematic in both a school and social situation. So, our group decided how we were going to frame this Social Story and created 4 windows that we planned out how our video Social Story would unfold, which you will see in the edited format tomorrow...so, no need to spoil that in class excitement.

Needless to say, having the experience of using the iPod Nano for a video assignment was very exciting and very easy to use as a tool. We recorded our video, loaded it onto Terri's laptop, converted the file so that it would be picked up by Prism and then edited the video in Movie Maker. I was not familiar with Movie Maker at all and have to say that it was very easy to use. It is completely user friendly as none of us in the group were familiar with video editing prior to today. I am not going to say we are the next Stephen Spielberg in the making, however our video went from a very basic beginning as just a recording to a video that was edited into clipped segments to match our Social Story planning framework. We then took it a step further and added in dialogue in each of our segments to match our Social Story and finally we got adventurous and created a wav file where Darlene recorded what the text said in each frame and we uploaded this to our video as well in Movie Maker!

This experience has helped to alleviate some stresses I had about using video clips and movie making on the computer as well as uploading information to the computer and using it on another device like and iPod Touch, Nano or other piece of technology!

I look forward to seeing all of the videos in tomorrow's class!