Kid in Story Book Maker

Kid in Story Book Maker is a story creator app especially designed for the creation of social stories. Initially conceived by Carol Gray, Social stories are short descriptions of a particular situation, event or activity, which include specific information about what to expect in that situation and why. They can be used to develop self-care skills (eg how to clean teeth, wash hands or get dressed), social skills (eg sharing, asking for help, saying thank you, interrupting) and academic abilities or to help a person with autism to understand how others might behave or respond in a particular situation, and therefore how they might be expected to behave.

Kid in Story Book Maker includes template stories where you can add familiar images to existing stories. These existing stories 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. Additionally, you can create stories from scratch using your own photos from the device library and inputting your own text.

What I really like about the application is the personalisation in the form of adding your own voice recordings to accompany each page, particularly useful for non-readers. From this point of view, the app can also be a useful hook to engage reluctant readers by creating a recorded version first and adding text later. Children with speech and language difficulties can find the recording aspect difficult but I have found they are engaged nonetheless.  

The apps use of green screen tech and image recognition software is pretty clever when extracting a facial image and dropping the background from existing photos. A clear an easy to follow video tutorial comes with the app allowing you to get up and running pretty quickly.

I have used the app recently to create a morning and bedtime routine based social story for a child on the autistic spectrum. The child was really engaged as they were part of the creation process and therefore proud of what they had made. Probably the most exciting part was the ability to share their story with other family members through the free reader app also from the developer. The app also allows me to email the story to parents which include directions to download the free reader. Even though the app is only available on ios, I am still able to email a PDF version for users of other operating systems.

Although originally designed with creating social stories and autism, there are many ways in which the app can be used. From the creation of more complex narratives, to a collaborative project whereby children in a larger class groupings can create their own chapters and share through the free reader.

Overall this is a really fun and engaging application. If there is one suggestion I would make to the developer, it would be to have more templates available for the user to choose from. Although I do feel this is the direction they are taking the app.

Kid in story Book Maker enables teachers to create a resource that makes unfamiliar tasks or environments more predictable and less stressful for young learners. Well done!