Innovative Technology to Increase Confidence & Student Success: New Tool for Social and Emotional Learning

An example of a MyLife digital portfolio.

Amidst the minefield of potentially harmful, social media apps that have so many young people trying to simply keep up by looking cool, there are some amazing online tools that build rather than break down one’s sense of self-worth. Enter Cognitopia with its MyLife multimedia digital portfolio that transforms how students can effectively communicate their strengths, goals, and learning styles … Read More

How Autistic Individuals Have Helped Direct Cognitopia’s Development

On Location Building New Video Content

Cognitopia’s development of self-management applications has been shaped by people with autism in ways both direct and indirect. From the beginning we have used a participatory design process whereby students and adults with autism work with us on design iteration and testing. For example, for the last five years, we’ve had a deep collaborative relationship with a local transition program … Read More

Staying Healthy Portfolio: How to Stay Positive, Keep Clean, and Be Informed about the Coronavirus

Staying Healthy Blog - Feature image

To showcase how our MyLife ePortfolio tool can be customized, we created a Staying Healthy portfolio with information on the importance of staying positive, keeping clean, and a list of useful resources related to COVID-19. Julie HenningJulie Henning has been with Cognitopia since 2015. In that time, she has been involved in customer support, training, marketing, documentation, social media, and … Read More

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 … 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

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

Using Goal Guide to Manage Routines at Home and in Middle School

Our work on cognitively accessible self-management applications has always relied on a participatory research approach that grounds development in the real-world life experience of individuals with disabilities and those who support them. We are fortunate to have a rich network of students and adults with disabilities, parents, and teachers who drive our iterative development approach by providing design input, using … Read More