Eye Gaze update

Our first ever blog post was all about Tom and what we were doing with the Eye Gaze. I wanted to write a blog post about how Tom is getting on now, 4 months later.

Tom is doing so well! We are still getting to grips a little bit with where to go and what is best to move Tom forward. We have been exploring all of the different games and activities and found things that Tom doesn't like and also things that he loves. Tom still very much loves the colouring in. This is almost his safe activity, if he does really well on an activity then he will always colour in afterwards as his downtime for working so hard.

Check out Tom driving his first car, aged 7!

Tom is flying through the activities. He is managing some of the activities that at the start of Tom's Eye Gaze journey I thought we wouldn't be achieving till the end of this year. There is one activity on the 'Choosing and Learning' learning curve software called 'Cosmic Cafe'. In this activity Tom has to choose from a range of different food items on display, move them across the screen to the character and then Tom has to decide when they have had enough to eat . Once they have had enough to eat Tom has to look at the till and then take the money from the customer. There are a lot of steps to this activity but Tom loves it, he does so well and very rarely have to prompt him with what to do. Tom does enjoy overfeeding the characters until they almost burst!

The challenge now is maintaining Tom's interest. I am always on the look out for more software coming out and seeing what will work with Tom and what won't, we give everything a go and never rule anything out. We also use his Eye Gaze to watch movies on and I think this helps get Tom used to looking at the screen for a prolonged period of time.

I have discovered that I can change the images in a lot of the activities to make them relevant to Tom so I want to start and put pictures of Tom's family and his dog and see how the will change his reaction to the games as he will be more drawn to the images on the screen and this may motivate him even more!

Initially we were focusing on one activity for a whole week and our aim was to complete the activity by the end of the week. This worked so well that now Tom is able to complete an entire activity in an hour or two rather than a whole week.

Today I have started to create choice boards for Tom on 'Choose it Maker 3' by Inclusive Technology. This will hopefully give Tom more independance and he will have a choice with what he wants to do in his day. Check out the link below for 'Choose it Maker 3'.

On the whole Tom is doing so brilliantly with the Eye Gaze. I am going to continue to look for more ideas to keep it new and exciting. I would be really interested to hear from anyone who uses the Eye Gaze and your tips and tricks!

Choose it Maker 3: https://www.helpkidzlearn.com/cm3-login