Wendy's logo with text below:
Story

Cody’s Favorite LOGOs iBook

A high school student with traumatic brain injury learns to identify community signage.

Cody, a high school student with multiple disabilities due to a traumatic brain injury (TBI), is learning to visually identify and name fast food signs in his community. Like many TBI students, Cody has trouble processing visual information and recalling the name of objects.  Cody struggles to identify letters, especially letters on signs as different fonts are used.  One of Cody’s functional daily living skills goals is to be able to identify signs in his community.

Cody is motivated by food related activities and is very familiar with fast food restaurants.  Once Cody learned to physically look at the picture, he then began to identify a piece of the picture that was familiar.  Example:  With the Wendy’s logo, Cody identifies the little girl with pigtails and associates the girl with Wendy’s. Cody is most apt to recall the name of the item when he can associate the item with a song, chant or motion.  Example:  With the McDonald’s “golden arches”, Cody associates the  commercial jingle, “I’m lovin’ it!”

As Cody was introduced to these logos, he was given time to look at and discuss the logo.  Often, Cody was unable to initially name a distinguishing characteristic of the logo, such as the little girl  on the Wendy’s logo.  However, once his instructor pointed out the little girl, Cody then noticed the girl.  Cody never used color or letters/words to identify these logos.  Initially, Cody was given several logos and asked to match the logos.  Then, Cody was asked to, “Point to the little girl on the Wendy’s logo.”  As Cody became more consistent with identifying the logos correctly, the hint about the little girl was dropped.  Eventually, Cody began naming the logos independently.  Each lesson began with a review with Cody’s teacher naming the various logos before Cody was asked to identify the logos.  Cody significantly reduced his learning time after he successfully learned to identify the first three or four logos.  Cody was most successful with familiar logos.

Cody was more successful with photos of these logos on his iPad than he was with printed images.  These images on his iPad were taken from the Internet.  (Example:  To search for the Wendy’s image, simply type in “Wendy’s logo” or go to Google Images and search for “Wendy’s logo”.)  Cody initially viewed these images in the Photo app on his iPad.  Then, the images were used to create an iBook.  The sentence below each image is Cody’s verbal description of the image.

True success!  After learning various fast food logos in his iBook, one afternoon Cody was in the car traveling to an O&M destination.  On his own, Cody looked out the window and excitedly pointed out and named the fast food restaurants as he passed them!

Note:  Since the goal of this activity is to improve his visual processing, VoiceOver was not used.  However, the iBook was created to be fully accessible – including picture descriptions – so that all students can access this iBook.

Learning to identify logos was one activity/learning goal for Cody.  For more information about the activities and sequences of his visual processing, identifying functional signs, and daily living skills program, see Cody: Learning Life Skills post.

Cody’s Favorite LOGOs

For more information about Cody, go to Cody: Learning Life Skills through Technology post.

Attached File(s)

https://www.perkins.org/wp-content/uploads/elearning-media/Cody_Favorite_LOGOs_0.ibooks
By Diane Brauner

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