Announcing the New MyLife

Earlier this week Cognitopia released a major upgrade to the MyLife ePortfolio application for IEP Self-Direction and Person-Centered Planning.

MyLife is being successfully used in elementary, middle, and high schools as well as in college programs and adult customized employment and supported living services across the United States. The new MyLife is more intuitive, customizable and user-friendly, strengthening the focus on self-determination—a core value of the Cognitopia Platform. The new design reflects the incredible feedback and suggestions we’ve received from all of these user groups. Continue reading →

Giving Students Meaningful Data to Measure their Progress

Measuring student progress is essential to understanding areas of student need. For individuals with intellectual barriers or unique learning styles, activities like standardized testing or even quiz scores and letter grades over time can be demeaning and seem pointless. Perhaps more valuable for students’ overall educational experience is being able to understand for themselves how they are doing on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis through meaningful data visualization. Continue reading →

Empowering Students to Participate in their Own IEP Meetings

Individual education planning (IEP) meetings can often be stressful for everyone involved and not feel particularly good for parents and teachers alike. But IEP meetings can be even more painful for students when they are not included and not prepared for what the meeting will involve.

Like many educators, I am a firm believer in having the student involved and engaged in their own IEP meeting and I often get asked about how to best involve students in the meeting planning process. Continue reading →

Routines App: Creating Custom Categories in Routines

As the name implies, Custom Categories in Routines allows you to group a collection of routines that are specific to, say, an organization, a school, or a community living facility.

The benefit of the Custom Categories feature is that many people can be added to the category during the time it is created. For example, a teacher may create a custom category called Community Living Skills and add all of his currently-enrolled students with an existing Cognitopia account. Continue reading →

Feature Update for ScanDo! App: Add to Print List

One of the original apps available within the Cognitopia platform, ScanDo! hasn’t had many design updates in recent months. And, until now, ScanDo! has primarily been a stand-alone app.

Using a relatively simple interface, ScanDo! is intended to provide on-demand support for task completion via images, video modeling, or text-based documents by browsing a curated library of media that are paired with a unique QR code. When you scan the QR code with the ScanDo! app, you see the document or video that is linked to that code. Continue reading →

Cognitopia Webinar: “Do it, Track it, Show it”

Last month we had our first webinar “Do it, Track it, Show it,” where Tom Keating spent the better part of an hour introducing attendees to the fundamentals of the Cognitopia Platform. He began with a general discussion on how the Cognitopia apps support self-determination, transition, and independent living and then moved into some of the core design features that facilitate both independent and shared/team use. Continue reading →

Innovative Self-Management Apps for Aging in Place

More and more, technology enables our lives in ways that facilitate independence and connectivity and it seems like there’s an app for just about everything. For individuals aging in place, apps can help them stay organized, accomplish daily goals, or remotely link them to their adult children, a team of caregivers, or the support services they need in order to continue to live in their homes and thrive within their communities. Continue reading →

Using the New Routines App for Completing Tasks

The Routines app provides a way to show the steps needed to complete a task using text, images, or video. Use Routines when you want to support task accomplishment without needing to track progress data. You can create your own collection of routines or you can browse from a library of routines submitted by other Cognitopia users. And you can share your own routines to that same community library.

Continue reading →

Understanding the Support Hub

The Support Hub appears in your Dashboard when you’re connected to an individual with whom you have a supporting relationship, such as teacher-student, parent-child, caregiver-client, or supporter-supported person. The Support Hub serves as your toolbox for helping anyone you support on the Cognitopia Platform. Continue reading →

How Cognitive Support Technology Is Empowering One Man with Autism

Raising three boys in rural Oregon in the late 1980s and 1990s, Trina began to first notice unique developmental behavior in her three-year-old son Clinton as he was just learning to read. “Clinton had learned all of the sounds, but phonetically he couldn’t put them together. Even today, Clinton is more typical in that he can read the dictionary and learn the definitions of words or small things, but he cannot read a novel.” Continue reading →

What if You Are Unable to Talk?

Every word is part of living. So what if you are unable to talk? “What do you do to communicate?” People have been asking me that question since I was little. I tell them I use sign language for communicating with people. Then people ask me how do they understand you without an interpreter? Well, I have an iPad. That has a program called TouchChat. Continue reading →

How Goals and Routines Connect

Managing the Routines of Daily Living

Goal Guide helps individuals with cognitive disabilities set goals, track progress, and share their accomplishments with others. In the course of developing Goal Guide we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the relationship between goals and routines of daily living. Continue reading →