Social Skills Program Review by Advanceweb.com

We’re fortunate to have several members of the Speech-Language Pathologists’ community who use, review, and recommend our social skills learning program.

Speech-language pathologist, Jeremy Legaspi, recently posted this review of The Social Express on the community site, advanceweb.com

The Social Express is gorgeous animated and interactive app to address social skills. It was created to work on social skills as well as target children’s social thinking skills by problem solving situations.  It’s intended to be used for elementary school-aged children with autism, Asperger’s Syndrome, ADHD, nonverbal learning disabilities, pragmatic language deficits or other social-cognitive challenges.

This app provides some of the following:

Integrates many components including: hidden rules, Social Thinking® concepts, video modeling, self-regulation, and problem solving to help the user and adult “put it all together”

– Allows for multiple responses with different outcomes

– Presents teaching tips to assist the adult working with the user to expand on each lesson

– Provides printables for generalization of the presented skills

The Social Express [is] using video modeling to provide the visual models that children with Autism and ADHD need and crave. What is Video Modeling? Video modeling is a method of teaching that uses videos to provide a visual model of targeted behaviors or skills.

These scenes are animated.

There are 16 lessons across 2 Levels. Each Lesson has a Skill Level, Hidden Social key, and a goal. These include:

Skill Level 1

Skill Level 1: What are they thinking about?

Hidden Social Key: Look at what others are looking at

Goal: To introduce the concept that we look at things that we are  thinking about

Skill Level 1: Being with the group

Hidden Social Key: Keep your body facing the group

Goal: To introduce the concept that it’s important to keep your body facing the group

Skill Level 1: Pick the feeling

Hidden Social Key: User your eyes and brain to figure things out

Goal: to demonstrate how peoples’ bodies and face express emotions

Skill Level 1: Using the DPS: Digital Problem Solver

Hidden Social Key: Monitor and adjust your behavior when you’re in a group

Goal: to allow the user to identify and solve social problems

Skill Level 1: What’s Next?

Hidden Social Key: User your eyes and brain to figure things out

Goal: To present the concept of inferring what will happen next

Skill Level 1: What are they doing?

Hidden Social Key: Look at who is talking

Goal: To introduce the concept of figuring out what others are doing by looking at them

Skill Level 1: Saying the right thing

Hidden Social Key: Talk about things that others like to talk about

Goal: To introduce the concept that it is important to think about what other people like

Skill Level 1: Unlocking the clubhouse

Hidden Social Key: Use your eyes and brain to figure things out

Goal: To provide an opportunity for the user to observe and identify when others are using hidden social keys

Skill Level 2

Skill Level 2: Watch what I do

Hidden Social Key: Look at what others are looking at

Goal: To introduce the concept that it is important to watch what others are looking at or doing

Skill Level 2: Using our friend files

Hidden Social Key: Keep your body facing the group and talk about what others are discussing

Goal: To introduce the concept of listening to what others are saying

Skill Level 2: Thinking about your friend

Hidden Social Key:  Try to figure out what to do based on how others are feeling

Goal: To identify mad, sad, happy, and scared feelings, and figure out what to do when others are feeling this way

Skill Level 2: Using the DPS:  Digital Problem Solver

Hidden Social Key: Monitor and adjust your behavior when you’re with a group

Goal: To introduce four coping strategies and the results of using them

Skill Level 2: What’s their plan?

Hidden Social Key: Use your eyes and brain to figure things out

Goal: To introduce the concept of observing other’s body and eye movements to figure out what they will do next

Skill Level 2: What does that mean?

Hidden Social Key: Look at who is talking

Goal: to introduce the use of idioms in conversation

Skill Level 2: Having a conversation

Hidden Social Key: Talk about what the group is talking about

Goal: To introduce the concept that people ask follow-up questions to find out more about a topic

Skill Level 2: Unlocking the clubhouse

Hidden Social Key: Use your eyes and brain to figure things out

Goal: To provide the opportunity for the user to observe and identify when others are using the Hidden Social Keys

The included printables are a nice way to make these lessons tangible for the child. Here are a few examples of what the printables look like:

Watch a video of the Social Express in action.

Overall the app has some amazingly cool features and targets a number of skills that most children on the spectrum need but maybe priced out of range of some SLP’s budgets. Priced at $89.99 The Social Express is available for Mac, PC, and iPad. I say treat it as an investment and check it out on the App Store for more info here: The Social Express.

This review originally posted by Jeremy Legaspi on Advance Web you can visit by clicking here,  Advanceweb.com