Occupational therapists, speech therapists, and teachers can create social stories for kids featuring kids they are working with, to help kids prepare for new situations or adapt to a routine. Kids can easily create their own stories, too, using pictures of themselves. The templates currently on the app include: Faces iMake, Let's Get a Haircut, What Will I See in San Francisco?, Are Monsters Hiding in My Room?, On the Playground, When Is It Time to Wash My Hands?, and A Day at the Movies. The developer promises more templates to come.
Continue readingKid in Story Book Maker is a storytelling app for iOS that includes several template stories where teachers, therapists, parents, or older kids can add their image right into the story. With the impressive green-screen technology, it's easy to extract a person's image from a photo and eliminate the background, so just the picture of a person can be dropped into the scenes in the book. Teachers or therapists can create custom books from scratch using their own images and words, or they can add a kid's image into existing social story templates. Add your own text and record your voice, as well. The developers also have a free reader app available, so you can share the books with others for at-home reading too.
Though many storybook creation apps exist, Kid in Story Book Maker is unique. Even with a relatively hefty price tag, its social story focus makes it a valuable asset for kids, especially those with special needs who require extra help with social or communication skills. A video tutorial shows exactly how to use the tool, which is so easy to manipulate that kids will quickly be able to create their own stories and insert themselves or their friends into them. The green-screen technology that finds the person within the picture and extracts him or her is pretty impressive. Even if it's wrong at first, it's easy to change the parameters to extract only the person's image from the background. Kids can easily share their storybooks, too, even with friends and family who do not buy the app, since there is a free reader available for download. Ways to use Kid in Story Book Maker are limitless -- from creating stories to prepare kids for new situations, to describing emotions using text and images (or spoken word) in therapeutic settings, to creating stories on any topic in any class.