Schools

Picture Planner lets students plan their own schedules for school, home, and community activities. It's accessible to students with a wide range of cognitive abilities, and is designed to prompt them easily through competent schedule creation. Picture Planner provides many of the functions of a typical calendaring program, such as recurring activities and pop-up reminders, but with a cognitively accessible interface. Teachers will find the Group Scheduling feature handy. It lets staff create sets of activities that are common to multiple student schedules, and then automatically populates each group member's schedule with those activities. Picture Planner offers a quantifiable and reviewable source of documentation for tracking IEP progress on goals related to personal organization and task accomplishment.

Families

Families can use Picture Planner at home, beginning with early computer use, to build customized collections of symbols and personalized user photos that are the most meaningful to a child or an individual with cognitive disabilities. Schedules can be built around family activities, household chores, or personal care routines specific to leaving for school or going to bed. Schedules can be printed out or, for Windows Mobile 5 devices, exported to a handheld device and carried between home and school or work.

Supported Living

Individuals living on their own or in shared living situations have the same need to manage their activities as anyone else. Whether used independently or with assistance, Picture Planner provides an accessible way for individuals with disabilities and their support staff to engage in regular activity planning in a way that augments opportunities for expression of personal choice and self-determination. Unlike paper schedules, plans that are created in Picture Planner are easily created and changed with a few clicks or screen touches, and they can printed out and used as a a prompting system around the house or out in the community. Customizable image options let users incorporate the photos of actual places, people, and things that mean the most to them. Each icon that is clicked or touched includes an image, text label, and text-to-speech pronunciation of the item, providing multiple sources of user feedback and navigation.