Hello Everyone.=) Our group is called the Buddha's and in this week's current event for our Leeward 279 class, our topic was on identifying an Apple Ipad app and activity for students with special needs.
This week's topic that we chose was submitted by our group member Michelle Mukaida. She had found a Apple Ipad app called Dexteria on youtube. It is a 8:02 video about how Dexteria can be used to develop and assess fine motor skills in children with special needs and also can be used in adults. The video presentation was presented by Gary James under the title: Apps for Children with Special needs. The video can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqvtvBn3hzU.
To quote Michelle: "Dexteria is a set of therapeutic hand exercises that improve fine motor skills and handwriting readiness in children and adults. Dexteria's unique hand and finger exercises take full advantagge of the multitouch interface to help build strength, control and dexterity. For best therapeutic results, the exercises should be done on a regular basis in short exercises."
Dexteria was designed by Occupational Therapists to help students and or adults to develop their fine motor skills.
Dexteria is an interactive app and starts off with the program prompting the person to put their hand on the screen so that it can "calibrate it" to it's specific level. In this specific app, there are three different programs that you can choose to do. Or the person can do all three programs.
The first app that was introduced was called Tap It. There is a voice that starts off prompting the person to put thier hand on the screen to calibrate and set the program to that person's specific hand level. Next, there are dots that appear on the screen and the voice prompter tells the person to keep their thumb on a dot with a specific anchor symbol. The voice prompts the person to keep their thumb positioned on the anchor and not to remove it during the exercise. Then, the other four fingers are tested to see how any dots the person's fingers can touch in a specific timed exercise. There are ten levels to this Tap It program and it gets harder with each level. The challenging part is with each level, the number of dots increase as well as the speed of the dots that appear on the screen. It prompts the person doing the exercise to think fast and to manipulate their fingers to touch as many dots as they can.
The next program in Dexteria, is called Pinch It. There are five levels to pinch it and the levels increase and becomes challenging as the program progresses. Again, it is interactive, and the person has to pinch as many crabs on the screen as possible in a timed exercise. As the levels progress, the number of crabs multiply and increase and the person has to pinch as many crabs as they can.
The third program in Dexteria, is called Write It. This specific program teaches students/ adults how to write. It is also interactive, and at the top of the screen there is the alphabet that person can choose the specific letter to learn how to write. The letter appears on the screen, with dots on them, and the trick is, the person has to remember to keep their finger directly on the dots and letter to practice writing the letter.
At the end of the programs, there is a Dexteria activity log which keeps a detailed log of the specific date, time, and number of exercises in each program that the person practiced in that day. It also keeps a log of how fast each activity the person attempted to do. These logs are great because you can email them to the parents and also to other support staff as well.
And that is our current event for this week: Dexteria: very cool Apple Ipad app.
Thanks Michelle.=)
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