Announcing the New MyLife
Earlier this week Cognitopia released a major upgrade to the MyLife ePortfolio application for IEP Self-Direction and Person-Centered Planning.
MyLife is being successfully used in elementary, middle, and high schools as well as in college programs and adult customized employment and supported living services across the United States. The new MyLife is more intuitive, customizable and user-friendly, strengthening the focus on self-determination—a core value of the Cognitopia Platform. The new design reflects the incredible feedback and suggestions we’ve received from all of these user groups.
What Can You Do With MyLife?
We’ve shown that MyLife can enhance IEP self-direction and increase satisfaction with the IEP process for teachers, parents, students, and administrators, and we think the new design will only amplify those results. You can read about those findings here.
Students have been playing an active role in their IEP meetings and educators are consistently telling us MyLife is helping students to be more engaged and self-determined as they prepare for graduation, transition, and beyond.
To see the new MyLife in action, click on one of these demo user accounts:
Life Skills Portfolio: Tabitha Student
College Student Portfolio: Damon Rickard
Workplace Innovation and Opportunity Portfolio: Steve Johnson
Transition Student Portfolio: Jon Student
What’s New?
If you’re already using MyLife, it may look different, but don’t worry. All of your information has been preserved. All categories, subcategories, posts, images, video, text, audio, and other content have been automatically migrated over to the new design.
The biggest improvement can be seen on the MyLife home screen. The fixed purple background is gone, and the old layout has been replaced with a cleaner-looking map of categories that surround the user.
By default, the new MyLife uses a strength-based layout that reflects common elements of student-directed individual educational programming (IEP), but it is now customizable. New custom categories and subcategories may be created, adding your own text and choosing an icon from a standard library or uploading your own image. The home screen background color can be changed and a favorite background photo may be added to make it your own.
It’s also now a lot easier to create, edit, and share media and content of all kinds, including an option to add goal progress data directly from the Goal Guide app.
If you’re already using MyLife, let us know what you think. If you haven’t tried it yet, click here to get started. We’d love to hear your story.
Tom Keating, Ph.D. is founder and CEO of Cognitopia, home of the Cognitopia Platform for Self-Determination, emphasizing tools for IEP self-direction, goal management, task analysis, and team coordination. Keating has been focused for the past 20 years on research and development of self-management and community living applications for individuals with cognitive disabilities and has been principal investigator on over 20 federally-funded technology development projects. He is also a Courtesy Research Associate in the Computer and Information Sciences Department of the University of Oregon. Keating’s perspective in all of his work has been strongly influenced by his experience of 31 years as a primary supporter for a brother who experienced autism.
