Colourful Semantics: App Review and Giveaway

I am always looking for ways to work with my students with ASD on creating sentences about pictures.  I stumbled upon this app, Colourful Semantics by London Speech Therapy, that looked really promising. I was lucky enough to be able to review this app, and the creators of this app were also generous enough to offer three apps for a GIVEAWAY!

Colourful Semantics is based on research carried out in the UK (1997 and 2011) to work on developing a student's:

• spoken sentences
• answering WH-questions
• use of nouns, verbs, prepositions and adjectives
• story telling skills
• written sentences
• written language comprehension

To start using this app, you first click the Setup button. 

Next, you choose your user.  You can either create a new user or an existing user.

Then, you choose the level that you want to work on.  There are 5 levels: who, what doing, what, where, and describe.  On the preset pictures, I have not noticed that you can really use the 'what' or 'describe' levels yet.  I am hoping they will be more included on the next version (1.2) that is supposed to come out in the next two months.

Next, you select your scene that you would like to work on.  The version I downloaded on my school iPad had eight different scenes, but you are able to add more.  I am actually a little confused though, because when I downloaded the app to my home iPad, I was only able to access three of the scenes.  Not sure why this happened.

It is not too hard to add a scene.  I added two to my school iPad.  I can see so many uses for this option.  My students love seeing pictures of themselves.  In our social language group, I will take pictures of them engaging in activities, and then ask other students what their peers are doing in the pictures.  Many of the have goals that target commenting on others' activities.

 When you add a scene, the app guides you to enter the question, and choose four options for answers.  You record all of the answers.  The symbols offered as answers were a bit limited for the pictures I chose so I took pictures of some Boardmaker pictures and uploaded those to the app really easily. 

 

When you are done selecting your options, you can press Start to begin working.

The narrator asks the question, and students are able to pick an answer from a choice of four icons.  After the student selects the answer, there is a pause in the app for the student to say the answer.

At the end of the questions, the student is prompted to state an entire sentence about the picture.

When you are done with the session, there is a data sheet presented.

  What do I like about this app?

• I love the ability to add your own scenes!  This will be so useful in my groups.
• I love the visual choices for answers.
• The app is very easy to use.

What would make it even better?

• Ability to record student responses so that they could listen to their sentences and answers.
• Ability to save data to track student progress.
• More preset scenes.
• A little more wait time, or an option to pause the app, for students who need more time to state their sentence.  My students definitely needed more time.

**The app reviewed is version 1.0.  The app developers told me that a new version (1.2) is coming soon, and will include more scenes, options to turn off music, ability to save scores, and a faster way to add new scenes.

You can visit the app developers website at: London Speech Therapy
The Colourful Semantics App is available for $39.99 on iTunes.

You can also win a copy of this app by entering here!  There are three copies available.

a Rafflecopter giveaway


I was provided a copy of the app by London Speech Therapy for this review.  I was not compensated in any other way for this review.

Jen