Literacy App Video

Summit School is located in Montreal,

we have 3 campuses.

We service students with special needs,

primarily with intellectual disabilities

with or without autism.

It's a free public school.

We're quite specialized, obviously,

for working with students with

special needs. We have multiple

professional working with us.

We all work together in an

interdisciplinary model to help the

students achieve their best potential.

This app that we're working on is a

literacy app. So it's going to help

students that have specific literacy

needs that are struggling with

traditional method of instructions.

So we're looking at kids, it could be of

starting ages of 6 all the way up to 21

It's primarily for students that

have difficulty reading printed text.

In classrooms, teachers have worksheets,

there's workbooks.

The students who have struggling

reading skills might not be able to do

the worksheets independently.

SnapType Pro App is an app

that is used for people that have

fine motor difficulties and that

can't write with a pen and paper.

So what the student is able to do

is take a snapshot of the worksheet,

here's a pre-loaded one,

and fill in the blanks with using text.

The problem about this app, it only meets

the needs of students that have

fine motor difficulties and are using it

as a writing tool. What would be great

is if it had the capability of reading back

what was taken a picture of.

The other app that we use is called

ClaroPDF. ClaroPDF, it's a combination of

the reading capabilities and the typing

capabilities but it is very busy

in terms of an interface

and our students struggle with using it

independently. So when we're looking to

increase independence, this is actually

bringing them down because it's having the

teacher to have to manipulate the buttons

for the students.

So our goal is to design a tool that's

easy to use, where a student can take

a snapshot of the worksheet and have it

read back to them and also be able to

input information on the worksheet.

So it combines both the reading and

writing aspect, but in a simplified manner

according to their specific needs.

The primary focus of the app would be

the interface and making sure it's

simple and stripped down of

unnecessary options for the students.