In a previous blog post, we showed how the Goal Guide app is being used by the Community Transition and Connections Program in Eugene 4J School District in Eugene, Oregon to foster independence and empower students to run a school store with minimal interaction, prompting, or supervision.

To observe Goal Guide in action, we recently visited Josh and the Connections crew. During our visit, one student was using Goal Guide to repair bicycles in the Bike Works lab and a different student was using Goal Guide to make a homemade pizza in the kitchen.

With two instances of Goal Guide up on his laptop, Josh was busy virtually observing both students concurrently. He answered a few questions for us.

How are you using Goal Guide to manage two students in two different rooms?

I have a Goal Guide window open to monitor what type of stuff one student is doing on his bike. And then I’m also checking in on the kitchen situation and I see that the other student has completed his first nine steps in making a pizza. And so what will happen is if I see a long period of time where things aren’t getting checked off, that prompts me to check in with the students and see what’s going on.

During this period, we usually have two students who are cooking two different meals, because one student is a week ahead of the other. When that happens, I’m able to monitor the progress of both recipes at the same time simply by opening a Goal Guide window for each student.

How did you run the cooking class before Goal Guide?

Prior to Goal Guide I created a website that uses the same video, ingredient list, tools list, and screenshots that would take them through the recipe. But we would still need to be in the kitchen and be giving verbal prompts to the students.

The website solution works, but the main problem we experienced is that when the video starts, the garlic and the onion are already minced. If a student needed to watch a different video on mincing garlic or dicing an onion, they would have to open additional videos in new tabs or browser windows.

Each time a new video is opened, it separates the student from the task analysis , making it easier for them to get off track.

In Goal Guide, there’s already a step to mince your garlic and dice your onion with instructional videos attached for each task. Having everything linked within one program eliminates the challenge of having to switch between tabs or browser windows and that really allows me to take a step back and let the students run through the tasks by themselves.

There’s also no other product that I know of that lets me supervise remotely while allowing my students to take something from the start of the task (washing hands) to the end (cleaning up). As an executive functioning tool for students, Goal Guide makes my job really easy.

Julie Henning

Julie Henning has been with Cognitopia since 2015. In that time, she has been involved in customer support, training, marketing, documentation, social media, and data collection. Some of her favorite projects have been mentoring our videographer intern, Nate, and weekly classroom testing and curriculum development for the many students in the 4J Connections Transition program. She works closely with Eugene-based SLLEA (Smart Living, Learning & Earning with Autism) to integrate Cognitopia’s self-management tools into the organization and structure design input and support platform implementation. Professionally, Julie has over twenty years’ experience working in engineering, technology, software development, and journalism; a path made possible with two degrees in Technical Communication: a BS from the Milwaukee School of Engineering and a MS from Colorado State University. A single mom of three high schoolers (grades 9, 10, and 11), Julie has introduced Cognitopia to terms such as “sick” and “yeet,” while overseeing the office coffee consumption. In her free time, she enjoys playing recreational soccer, improv comedy, and traveling.