As a technology-driven organization, we always believed in the power of innovation. In the beginning of our journey, we made an effort to understand the needs of parents, school districts, and therapists. Our team inspected a few schools in New Jersey and saw that the classrooms were having a very difficult time gathering and evaluating data, despite having highly qualified teachers and a reasonably well equipped infrastructure. We visited families who had at least one member with autism and heard stories of daily struggle, frustration and small moments of success. We were all ears to what parents kept telling us: my son or daughter is not receiving the kind of education that I would want him or her to have in the classroom.

When it comes to developing an intensive, coherent and robust model of autism intervention, we cannot undermine the importance of having highly qualified special education teachers. But at the same time, our school districts do not always have enough bandwidth to serve the growing number of students with autism. Then again, we do not have enough therapists and BCBAs to ensure intense intervention for each enigmatic little soul. To make matters more challenging, many of our schools lack resources due to budget constraints.

We cannot build new schools or recruit new staffs overnight to accommodate all the waitlisted students, but what we can do, is use the technologies that we have developed to synchronize intervention across homes and classrooms. Thanks to smartphone technology, a teacher can engage more than one student for hours in tasks that can be customized to meet each student’s unique learning goals. When the child gets home, parents can find the same lesson plans that the child was taught in the classroom. Consistency, synchrony and ease of application are what we can offer through the resources we have.

A leap forward

We took a giant leap forward on September 9, 2013, when we attended an event hosted by Eden Autism Services at the historic New Jersey State House. At the event, we unveiled two of our latest apps – iLearnNEarn2 – For Infants and Toddlers and iLearnNEarn2 – School and Adult Series. Our efforts were lauded by the who’s who of NJ’s autism community that included public policymakers, experts, assemblymen and women, and the media.

Visit Innovation for Autism to learn more about the event.

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