Hot off the Press! New and Retooled Apps!
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PSN Team 
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New and Retooled Apps
We get excited around here by innovative and creative technologies that help children with disabilities develop, become more independent and succeed in life. Keeping up with the thousands of apps that come to market every day is no small feat (and we do not claim to do it), but to start off, we have compiled some new apps that have certainly caught our attention. We hope that you find an app or two that become your new favorite!
Circles Social Skills Utility
By James Stanfield Co., Inc.
Circles App: Social Boundaries & Relationships is an outstanding tool for teaching social boundaries to individuals with developmental delays. Circles uses a visual format of color-coded, concentric “spheres of intimacy” that represent the degrees of physical closeness a person might experience.
The app is user-friendly, allowing each user to create their own personal profile (using either real pictures or avatars), and drag-and-drop the profiles of others into their circles; this allows the user to visually see where family, friends and strangers fall on their Circles chart, and the varying degrees of physical contact that are associated with each circle (who gets a hug, who gets highfives, etc.).
Price: $39.99Â | Offers In-App Purchases
Toca Boca World
By Toca Boca AB
Toca Boca World encourages everyone to be whoever they want to be through tools that let them play, create & self-express in infinite ways like unlocking hundreds of secrets, staying in a 5 star hotel, spending a day at the beach with friends, directing a sitcom, designing a restaurant or running a dog daycare center! And more, so, so much more.
Price: FREE | Offers In-App Purchases
Avaz FreeSpeech
By Avaz, Inc.
Designed for children six years and older, FreeSpeech is a visually appealing and interactive app that guides its users to create grammatically correct sentences. Drag and rearrange picture tiles, and the app will convert them into a perfectly grammatical English sentence. Explore how tenses, sentence forms, parts of speech, and other grammatical properties change the structure of English – – and it’s all visual.
Price: FREE | Offers In-App Purchases
Tommy’s House
By Juan Agustin Grassi
From the moment the app is opened, the user has control over where to go and what to do as he or she explores various rooms in Tommy’s house. Each room is full of interactive fun. A touch-based and intuitive interface where learners can play without parents support, exploring and discovering new items and situations in every room of the house. The app was designed for an international kids audience – which means minimal text.
Price: $2.99 | Offers In-App Purchases
Here Comes the Bus
By Synovia Solutions LLC.
The app allows you to view the realtime location of your child’s school bus on your smartphone, tablet or computer. With it, you will have the information you need to send your children to the bus stop at just the right time, helping to protect them from inclement weather and other roadside dangers.
Price: FREE
News-O-Matic, Daily Reading for Kids
By Press4Kids
News-O-Matic is a fun, engaging and accurate digital news source designed just for kids! The magazinelike app contains interactive activities and videos. Each day, News-O-Matic features five stories (written at 3 reading levels) covering the United States, international news, arts, sports, science and more. News-O-Matic articles are ad-free, bilingual and written by a staff of journalists, including educational experts and reviewed by a psychologist to ensure age appropriate content.
Price: FREE | Offers In-App Purchases
DayCape – Daily visual planning
By Daimonic AB
DayCape is an app that allows therapists, teachers, parents, and even the child themselves to set up visual schedules to help them understand and manage the events in their day. This app was recently updated to allow users to use this tool offline with no internet connection. It has also added a customization feature to choose a favorite sound for notifications within the app. Kids can make it their own!
Price: FREE | Offers In-App Purchases
Waze Navigation & Live Traffic
By Waze Inc.
Drivers or passengers in your area share real-time traffic and road information to save time and gas.
Child Reminder, a new feature of Waze, will appear once the vehicle reaches its destination by displaying a reminder not to forget a child in the car. The customizable notification means that the user can set a reminder for more than just children once they reach their destination: a reminder for a pets, groceries, or simply something that they need to remember to do after a long car trip.
Price: FREE
If you are interested in searching for more apps, creating your own list of apps and sharing them, please go to BridgingApps.org. BridgingApps, a program of Easter Seals Greater Houston, is a community of parents, therapists, doctors and teachers who share information about using mobile devices with people who have special needs.
Cristen Reat is co-founder of BridgingApps and a mother who found success when using a mobile device with her children who have special needs.
Amy Barry is the Content Manager and Editor at BridgingApps and mother of five children.
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This post originally appeared on our January/February 2017 Magazine
