ACE – Video Modeling Tony Gentry Transcription provided by: Caption First, Inc. >> TONY GENTRY: Welcome to VCU Autism Center of Excellence video log. We'll talk about smart technology. I'm Tony Gentry from Virginia Commonwealth University. This video log is about video modeling. Of all the assisted technologies used to support people with autism, video modeling has the strongest evidence base. What is video modeling? It just means having a little video clip that shows the successful performance of some task. It can be an everyday activity with complex steps, it can be social story behaviors in the community, finding your way around inside a building or elsewhere, behavioral prompting, or just encouragement and cuing. You watch the video and in watching the video it helps you learn how to perform the task. You can get already-made video modeling apps. One is an app called Going Places. You can see the web link there. Six locations are in this particular package; this is free on the App Store. Another is Everyday Skills by AbleLink. This app includes 40 different activities. It's rather steep, about $40 and available to play on all the Apple portable products. That said you're probably going to want to make your own individualized or personalized video models. There are several ways to do that and we'll be talking about that in the next few minutes. One way to do it is to simply create a test sequencing PowerPoint with pictures and typed cues and download that to your portable device. Here's an example of that kind of thing. There's a young man with autism who I've been working with who's beginning his very first job at a local hospital. His job in the hospital is to load the crash carts that sit outside the hospital rooms of everyone in the intensive care unit. This is a very important job. If he leaves an item out of one of their drawers, a person could die. It's also a complex job because as you can see from the picture, there are lots of different drawers and lots of different items in those drawers on each cart. To support him, I took photographs of each drawer of the cart, made a sequence of those in PowerPoint and listed alongside the pictures, all the items that go in the cart. Then I just downloaded it to his iPod Touch which he carries in his pocket at all times. When he's ready to load a cart, he pulls out his iPod Touch and walks his way through the video, making sure he gets everything he needs to into the drawers. We'll show the video now just to give you a sense of how that's done. (Video plays 02:52 through 03:19) >> TONY GENTRY: As you notice, there's no audio on this PowerPoint video. That's okay in his case because he's able to read the text and follow the pictures to help him do his task. Another thing you probably noticed is that the video moves rather quickly. That's okay because he can just tap the screen to pause and then play again to move on to the next slide as he needs to in doing his task. If you want to try out video modeling, though, right now you've got lots of other kinds of opportunities. For instance, the iPod Touch, the iPhone, the iPad, and all of the Android tablets, all come with video cameras and video playback capabilities. So you can just make your own video that you need to make directly on the camera on the product that the person will be using and take it from there. Thinking along those lines, you want to include some thinking about production values. What works? Well, you want close-ups because the person's probably going to be watching the video on a pocket-sized device. You want ample lighting so that the person can see what's going on. It's nice to record step-by-step audio prompts while the person's performing on the video. It's a lot easier to do that than it is to add audio later in post-production. It's a good idea to show what the person sees so you're sort of shooting over their shoulder and showing what they're seeing as they're doing a task. You want to make it short and to the point and you want to give it an appropriate title so it's easy to find when the person's looking for it on the device. A good way to use video modeling is in way finding. It's hard to use GPS in the community if you're just a pedestrian and you really can't use it inside buildings, so making a video that shows turn-by-turn directions can be very helpful. Here's a video made by occupational therapy students at VCU that gives you an idea of how to do that. It follows the production guidelines we just talked about. >> Arrive at work. Lock your bike. Head to the front door. Push automatic door button on the right. Show your badge to security. Walk to the elevators. Push the "up" arrow on the elevator. Push button for Floor 2. Turn right off of elevator. >> TONY GENTRY: Another reason way finding videos work well for people with cognitive/behavioral challenges is that it's going to be difficult to match what you see on a map to what you see in the real world. With a video, of course, you're looking at the real world so that can be a lot easier. Another kind of video modeling is direct advice given by a caregiver about a particular situation. Here's a good example. A young woman I worked with was calling her mom who lived out of state many times a day to ask for advice about decisions she needed to make. This was driven not so much by her autism, probably as by her obsessive compulsive disorder. The solution was to send her mom a Flip video camera, and to ask her to record short videos answering the questions that most often were asked in these telephone calls. She did that, she sent them back to me. Here's what one of those videos looked like: >> Hi, Jenny. I just want to give you some advice on what you could do if people make you angry and upset. You have to remember one thing: Don't let them see that you're angry and upset and you need to take some time to cool off before you say anything. Often times you say something that sometimes isn't nice because you're mad. What you need to do is go to your room, quiet down. If you're going to cry then you have a little cry, wash off your face and then think about what you're going to say to them before you say it. I think if you handle things in a calm manner, things will be better. I hope that helps. Bye. >> TONY GENTRY: I downloaded the Flip videos to the young woman's iPhone and contracted with her to use the videos as often as she could rather than calling her mom to ask her a question. She was able to cut back to two telephone calls a day. This has been liberating for her mom and very much liberating for the young woman who has gone on and left the group home, is living independently now, volunteering in the community and beginning to learn how to live independently in the community for the first time. Her mom and the young woman both give credit to this simple video modeling intervention for helping her start down that path. As I mentioned before, most of the Android tablets and all of the Apple products now have video cameras onboard so you have the ability now to create a product directly on the device that it's going to be played back on. Apple has recently released a simplified version of their iMovie editing software so that you can do simple edits as well directly on the camera. You're looking at a web link to a YouTube educational video teaching you how to use iMovie on the iPad. Well that's making a video. But of course the primary reason for doing this is so the person who needs the video can use it as an educational tool. There's some ways to help make that happen. One important thing that can help with buy-in is having the end user actually participate in the recording of the video; either helping to make the video or to act in it. When you're learning to use a video as an assisted technology, it's good to watch the video before you try the activity, to have the video available for a play and pause while you're doing the activity, and then also to play the video one more time after the activity to compare what you see on the video with how you actually performed. That's a terrific way to build insight and buy-in for the activity. Even after a person has learned to complete the activity without the video, many people feel that it's nice to have that video available on their device so they can access it if they need it. Having this kind of repetition is a terrific way to learn how to consistently perform a task. That's my overview of video modeling. The VCU ACE website offers many other strategies for supporting people with autism and I hope you'll be able to explore them. This is Tony Gentry at Virginia Commonwealth University. Thank you.