MyCalendar: Fostering Communication for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder through Photos and Videos

This paper presents MyCalendar; a visual calendar prototype App that was developed to support children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and language delays to communicate about their own activities and interests across the settings of home and school. MyCalendar was developed following in-depth fieldwork and participatory design sessions with parents, teachers and children from Preparatory year to year 2 of an Australian Primary School Special Education Unit catering largely for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Typically, children with ASD face difficulties in participating at school. MyCalendar was then evaluated over six months with four teachers, ten parents and eleven children. The study resulted in two key findings: (1) MyCalendar supported children who have ASD and limited verbal skills to better communicate their daily personal activities through photos and videos, encouraged by teachers and parents. (2) This deeper understanding of the children's daily lives enabled teachers to successfully model positive behaviours and to scaffold more relevant and meaningful learning opportunities by relating them to the children's lives. While it was initially expected that the activities would better support communication between teachers and parents, the MyCalendar led in fact to novel scaffolding of learning opportunities and modeling of communication in the classroom.