Boardmaker Uses in The Classroom Enviornment

Boardmaker is a computer software program that allows individuals to create picture icons/symbols for a variety of words and phrases. The picture/symbol icons can be use for a variety of purposes; teaching visual learners, scheduling activities, communication exchanges, matching activities, reading introductions, etc. Boardmaker has numerous uses and can benefit a variety of individuals of all academic levels.
Boardmaker has been very beneficial in my classroom environment. Teaching preschoolers with Autism can be challenging, especially when the students have little or no verbal abilities to communicate needs and wants. Using boardmaker to create visual icons/symbols paired with written words has greatly and positively affected my students’ abilities to communicate as well as follow directions.
I primarily use Boardmaker for students to communicate (exchanging pictures to make requests) and for visual schedules. For my students who are non-verbal, I was able to use Boardmaker to create a variety of picture icons to be used for communication purposes and for other learning concepts. I was able to make a variety of food icons for our breakfast, snack, and lunch items throughout the week, along with pictures of things the students thoroughly enjoyed (i.e. toys, food items, animals, activities). For students who had limited cognitive skills, we were able to provide a limited amount of pictures to choose from, and we directly taught the students to make choices and to make requests for items and food they desired. Higher functioning non-verbal students were able to choose from emotion icons to communicate their feelings.
Visual schedules were also created using Boardmaker. Many of my students use visual schedules to aid them in transitions throughout their school day. By using Boardmaker, I was able to create classroom master copies for all of our activities throughout the school day. All students who are in need of a visual schedule have been taught to “check their schedule” independently and to take each icon off their schedule and match it into an icon pocket at each activity. Not only has this greatly decreased negative transition refusals, it has also provided a sense of independence for my students. Students are provided with a transition signal (timer), and are now able to check their schedules independently.
Boardmaker has also benefited my high functioning students who are transitioning to Kindergarten by providing interactive reading exercises and sentence stem activities. I have used Boardmaker to make letter identification activities, word matching activities, sentence structure activities, opposite activities, association cards for matching games, and numerous other activities that help my students stay actively involved while learning a variety of academic skills.
I have nothing but positive things to say about Boardmaker. I currently use Boardmaker v.6 and for my Autism Preschool classroom, it has been greatly beneficial. I have used it in collaboration with our Speech Therapist, as well as with general education teachers. Some of my students are dual enrolled in Special Day Classes and General Education Preschools. With the help of Boardmaker, my students have been able to actively participate in the general education preschools by transitioning and following directions using their individual schedule that have been created by myself in collaboration with their Gen. Ed preschool teachers. I also provide my parents with copies of our master icons for them to use at home with their children. This has also been greatly beneficial, because it allows students to have consistency both at home and at school! Boardmaker has been beneficial for most of my students throughout my 3 years of teaching this program!!

Resources:

http://www.mayer-johnson.com/products/boardmaker/

http://region2library.org/boardmaker.htm

http://www.ceo.woll.catholic.edu.au/home/jdavies/access/boardmaker/boardmaker.html