Designing and producing video social stories

July 13, 2010.

I had another interesting day in the world of Assistive Technology!

Today we learned a great way to help support students, especially students with Autism, to independently deal with a certain situation or routine in a socially accepted manner.

We learned how to develop social stories and we were given many reasons why they would be beneficial to students and others to have this in place. If the goal is to increase the independent functioning of the student these social stories, if followed appropriately, would help the student in achieving that goal.

The stories typically have four types of sentences:

Descriptive (Where situations occur), Perspective (who is involved), Directive and Control.

The social story must be repeated so that the student can reflect back on what they memorized of that routine. Repetition and practice is key to the success of these social stories making a positive impact on the student's actions.

The Social story helps prepare individuals for what will happen in a particular social context and help ease anxiety in unfamiliar situations.

We were shown a case study of a girl with Autism. This girl was given supports to help achieve an IPP goal which was to act appropriately, both physically and verbally, while shopping at her favorite drug store. On a regular basis this girl would walk into the store and run down the isles and reach for things that she often was not given permission to buy. So a social story was put in place so the girl would understand and remember her expectations of shopping in the store for the future. This social story was presented to her, through the means of a video, that demonstrated the disirable behaviours that she was expected to follow when shopping at the drug store. Prior to every trip to the drug store this girl would watch the video. As time went on she needed less help from her support person and was able to independently demonstrate the desired behaviours.

After given this example of how a social story can have such positive outcomes, we were then given a differnt case study to work on so we could practise how to make social stories and video tape them on an ipod nano.

Tomorrow we will be comming up with our own social story for a student who we believe could benefit from it. We will then have the chance to video tape it on the ipod nano and present our video social story to the class.

This video is an example of a social story that can be used to help a student understand how to share and not fight.