Classroom-Based Assistive Technology: Collective Use Of Interactive Visual Schedules By Students With Autism

vSked is an interactive and collaborative assistive technology for students with autism, combining visual schedules, choice boards, and a token-based reward system into an integrated classroom system. In this paper, we present the results of a study of three deployments of vSked over the course of a year in two autism classrooms. The results of our study demonstrate that vSked can promote student independence, reduce the quantity of educatorinitiated prompts, encourage consistency and predictability, reduce the time required to transition from one activity to another, and reduce the coordination required in the classroom. The findings from this study reveal practices surrounding the use of assistive technologies in classrooms and highlight important considerations for both the design and the evaluation of assistive technologies in the future, especially those destined for classroom use.