Universally compatible with
all Apple devices
TherAd for Autism
TherAd for autism is based on video modeling. And video modeling works. My son has demonstrated that fact time and again. Braden, born in 2002 and has autism, loves to watch videos of himself. As he watches himself he begins to mimic his actions from what he was seeing on the video. There's no doubt video modeling is effective!
In case you're wondering, TherAd is an app that interrupts your kid's favorite movies to show him short video footage of his own positive behaviors. In essence, your kid's positive behavior is the ad... sort of a little commercial break every now and then. But the commercial serves a valuable purpose.
During the commercial break your child is required to hold two fingers on the iPad screen, otherwise everything comes to a stop until he complies. Requiring something from your child makes this app interactive and it also helps ensure that he's paying attention.
To help your child realize they need to do something, the movie stops and they see visual and written instructions to hold their fingers on the green spots on the lower corners of the iPad.
After that little clip is played (modeling content), a picture of the child is shown on the screen along with instructions to touch to continue their favorite film. These instructions are written. A quick tap and the movie is playing again.
TherAd allows you to add multiple children/clients. You can include multiple movies and clips of modeling content too. You can even export statistics via email.
To put new content (movies or video of your child) into the app you have to use iTunes file sharing. I must admit, when I have a movie already on my iPad I want to be able to get that movie into TherAd without having to turn to iTunes. I want it to access media that's on my iPad, unfortunately TherAd isn't designed that way.
If you sync your iPad over WiFi, It takes a while to load a full movie (1.5 gigs) into TherAd. When you directly connect, the process is much quicker. However, I had many problems importing movies. iTunes seemed to import the movies fine, but then TherAd wouldn't play them. Or, sometimes my movies wouldn't even show up in TherAd. That's a big problem that makes the app virtually useless.
Documentation was easy to find when I had questions or needed help with TherAd, but nothing could help with the movie importation issues. On the opening screen you'll see a 'Help' button in the upper right.
You have the ability to adjust how often your modeling content occurs, if you were able to import it. You can make it appear every minute or every 30 minutes or any minute in between. It's good to have that flexibility.
I found that TherAd's settings need to be password protected. It's way too easy to get in there and change things.
I noticed that movies always restart from the beginning. I see a need for movies to restart where they left off, even where each individual client last left off. Nobody wants to rewatch the first 25 minutes of a movie and trying to find the spot you left off can be impossible at times.
As mentioned, I see areas that TherAd could use improvement. Most noteably, it has to be able to import video flawlessly and play it without issues. Hopefully that will be remedied!
