Functional Conversation App Larry Irwin Kleiman

Description

Ages: 9-Adult
Grades: 4-Adult

This app addresses the improvement of conversation skills for older students and adults who have a variety of disorders including autism, aphasia, social language, auditory processing, and expressive language.

Your students will learn to engage in and create natural conversations through prompted conversation stimulation. Students make choices and have the freedom to select topics, responses, order of turns, and how long the conversation should last for each topic. Hundreds of conversation topics and prompts are included. Each can be inserted into a conversation as is or edited to reflect personal expression and preference.

First the user chooses from three options to start the conversation:

• Talk About Me
• Ask Someone a Question
• Choose a Conversation Topic

Additional choices show the student the logic of conversation and a list of options. For example, if a student chooses Talk About Me, he selects from options like these:

• Today, I...
• I'm going to see...
• I have something unusual to tell you.
• I have an idea.
• I saw...
• I need to...
• I'm planning to...

Additional options lead the student to make a comment, ask a question or change the conversational topic. The student chooses what to add or how to respond. Each partner takes a conversation turn by tapping the button with her name on it. You can take a picture of a student to display as a prompt when it's her turn. A partner can take several turns in succession.

The recently added, optional, text-to-speech feature allows your student to enter text and play it back. This means your student can listen to complete conversations, line-by-line, and realistically engage in them. This is particularly important for students who are nonverbal or have difficulty being understood. This new text-to-speech feature is only supported on devices running iOS7.

When the student decides to end the conversation, the conversation and data are automatically saved and dated. You can recall, edit, and email conversations as text files. The student can use the script he created to practice the conversation with another partner.

(©2012)