Autism and ICT

Autism and ICT

While on my last placement I had, what turned out to me the amazing opportunity to teach a boy with autism. At first it was somewhat of a daunting challenge to come up with strategies that included him in the lessons and enabled him to use his particular skills. For the purpose of this post lets call him Steve. Steve was a very talented drawer, and he love to redesign characters out of his favorite video games. In the English class that I taught him he often spent a lot of time drawing and working on ICT projects.

Below are some of the sketches that Steve did of video characters.

This got me thinking, what are the possibilities after school for students like Steve? Steve's father came to the parent teacher interview and I was able to talk to him about what he though Steve might do after school. His dad told me how talented he was with computers, which I already knew, and the he saw that there would probably be potential for him to work in the ICT industry, perhaps designing games and especially coming up with the graphics and characters.
I thought that this would be a fantastic possibility for Steve.

Then I got to further thinking about the how we teach students with Autism across the board. I think it is safe to say that some schools get it right and other are a little lost with what to do. With this in mind I went and visited the Autistic School in Mansfield to find out how best to facilitate students with autusisms learning. What I found was that across the board the higher functioning students loved activities that involved ICT. They were able to pick it up relatively fast and were good at learning programs and that it was a fantastic way to get them to learn. The school provided me with some great ideas of things that I could get Steve to try. It was with these ideas that I went back to the class room to see what I could get Steve to do.

For a unit of horror in english I suggested that as Steve knew a lot about editing movies he team up with one of the groups that were doing a movie for their project and offer to do the editing. This was a great success and the movie turned out really well.

All of the research that I found was positive towards the inclusion of ICT in the classroom with autistic students as it was a way to bridge gaps and help them to become included as well as giving them some practical skills to take with them after school.

Below is a website that I found particularly useful.
http://www.senteacher.org/Links/

I took this