Helping Young Communicators One Visual at a Time – Visuals2Go Review

I am a speech-language pathologist working in the early childhood special education population. Many of the children in our program do not communicate verbally, requiring pictures to communicate, request, comment, etc. throughout the school day to be understood. Visuals are essential for these early learners to be the most successful in the classroom. My coworkers and I stumbled across this app prior to the most recent update (when it was card Picture Card Maker). This app is versatile, easy to navigate with use, and efficient for making visuals on the go. The app is preloaded with many pictures. For example, there are sentence strips, shapes, colors, activities, toys, feelings, etc. Another critical functionality of the app is that you can use your phone or iPad to take pictures of the objects that you are using (in therapy for example) I absolutely love that I can take actual pictures of objects, throw together some picture cards, and sent it to the printer when I am in a time crunch. I spent this summer taking pictures of every therapy item I own and printed it into picture cards so the little communicators have access to every item to request or comment! Similar programs have been considered the "gold standard" of speech therapy are very expensive, time consuming, difficult to save to a PDF, and require a CD drive (if choosing the CD option). CD drives are becoming obsolete so I couldn't rely on that anymore. With this app, you are able to develop sentence strips and choice boards as well. When you select the pictures to add to a sentence strip, I have found that you have to return to the beginning of the app to access the sentence strips in order for the voice output to be activated. I personally won't use this feature as often, as I use my personal phone to put the pictures together and I don't trust many little hands playing with my personal phone. I can imagine how this would be functional for a child using an iPad to communicate at home in sentence form. For the choice boards, you are able to select items to move to a choice board and you can title the choice boards. The confusion I had when navigating the new update was sending items to the printer. You need to have an email set up through your iPhone in order to use the print function. I prefer to use my gmail app to navigate my email, so I had to use a "junk" email to put into the iPhone and I removed notifications. You are given the choice to print via air print or print via email, which convert your pictures into a PDF. This is one of my favorite and pivotal features of the app. I am able to send the pictures to print, then, I sent them via air print so I can save the PDF copies for when I need to re-print or make a new card if a card is damaged. In addition to ensuring an email is set up on your phone, I was having trouble with deleting and adding pictures. I wasn't able to figure it out going through the tutorial so I contacted the developer. If you hold the picture just long enough, it is a "copy" and duplicates the image; a double tap delete the image. Once you're in the print function, you are able to choose your template to the size of the cards you want. Options include 2x3, 1x1, 3x4, 4x5, 4x6, and 5x7. I found the 4x6 being exactly what I need for therapy. I can't praise this app and how much it has helped. All my coworkers that are on the iOS system have downloaded the app because of the ease of use. Since discovering it, it has made a difference in our little communicators because there is no excuse to not have a visual for an item since this app does it all :) Thank you!
Review by Kaila M. on Visuals2Go.