Healthy Cooking Becomes Routine for Residents of Independent Living Program

Surprising Gifts of a Better Meal Living in affordable housing units at Willakenzie Crossing, residents of SAIL Housing in Eugene, Oregon call over a dozen one-bedroom and studio apartments home-sweet-home. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, SAIL stands for “Supported Access to Independent Living” and operates with a mission of supporting sustainable housing in a life-enriching environment that fosters dignity and independence … Read More

Transitions Cost More Than $2.3B in IDD Support Services

Cyclic Regression Causes Expensive Turnover, Painful Restarts, and Critical Struggles.  Decrease staff training costs. Create smoother transitions for clients. Preserve your investments in human resources. Have a sustained impact on client quality of life. You have a clear and special mission to support people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), promote their independence, and to bring meaningful improvements to their … Read More

2018: A Year in Review

As 2018 comes to a close, we’re taking a moment to reflect upon the progress Cognitopia has made this year. We credit much of this momentum and success to you, our many wonderful students, teachers, clients, and organizations using the Cognitopia Platform for Self-Determination on a daily basis to facilitate person-centered planning, goal setting, and self-managed independent living and work. … Read More

Giving Students Meaningful Data to Measure their Progress

Measuring student progress is essential to understanding areas of student need. For individuals with intellectual barriers or unique learning styles, activities like standardized testing or even quiz scores and letter grades over time can be demeaning and seem pointless. Perhaps more valuable for students’ overall educational experience is being able to understand for themselves how they are doing on a … Read More

Empowering Students to Participate in their Own IEP Meetings

Individual education planning (IEP) meetings can often be stressful for everyone involved and not feel particularly good for parents and teachers alike. But IEP meetings can be even more painful for students when they are not included and not prepared for what the meeting will involve. Like many educators, I am a firm believer in having the student involved and … Read More

Feature Update for ScanDo! App: Add to Print List

One of the original apps available within the Cognitopia platform, ScanDo! hasn’t had many design updates in recent months. And, until now, ScanDo! has primarily been a stand-alone app. Using a relatively simple interface, ScanDo! is intended to provide on-demand support for task completion via images, video modeling, or text-based documents by browsing a curated library of media that are … Read More

Cognitopia Webinar: "Do it, Track it, Show it"

Last month we had our first webinar “Do it, Track it, Show it,” where Tom Keating spent the better part of an hour introducing attendees to the fundamentals of the Cognitopia Platform. He began with a general discussion on how the Cognitopia apps support self-determination, transition, and independent living and then moved into some of the core design features that … Read More

Innovative Self-Management Apps for Aging in Place

More and more, technology enables our lives in ways that facilitate independence and connectivity and it seems like there’s an app for just about everything. For individuals aging in place, apps can help them stay organized, accomplish daily goals, or remotely link them to their adult children, a team of caregivers, or the support services they need in order to … Read More