Reviewed by Grace
Custom Boards Premium by Smarty Ears is an app for making your own visuals and activity worksheets using 111 easy-to-use templates and a built-in library of over 11 thousands Smarty Symbols or your own images. The templates are grouped into 6 categories: -
Activities & Games – 20 templates. The articulation sheet and visual script get the most use in our home. Next is the “which ones go together?” template which we use for teaching a variety of concepts like matching community helpers to their workplace and object/function association.
Grids & Boards – 15 templates, from 1×2 to 6×7 grids. This is great for making various communication and choice boards.
Schedules & Calendars – 10 templates. We use the First/Then/Last board for event retelling/sequencing and following 2/3-step directions.
Worksheets – 19 templates including 4 for sequencing tasks, 2 for creating printable books, 1 for greeting card, 1 for sorting and 1 story board. The worksheet templates appeal to kids with their cute animal characters.
Devices & Switches – 33 templates.
Signs & Labels – 14 templates.
Once you’ve chosen the template to use, you can start to fill the empty cells with images from the built-in Smarty Symbols library. You can search for the image you want by scrolling through the 92 categories of images or just type in your requirement using the search function. This library is amazing, just looking through the categories and images was exciting, as it gave me many ideas on how to use this app. Some categories of images that we used recently are the Pronouns, Occupation (includes both gender and great for learning about plurals) and Communication (for building social skills). The app also allows you to use your own photos (and screenshots) from your iPad. You can further customize the image by changing or removing the image text as well as changing the background color for the cell. Sometimes you may want to have just text alone in the cell e.g. for signs and you can do that by inputting the text without an image.
When you have completed your customized template, you can preview it before proceeding to print via an air printer. You can also email it as a PDF file to your own email address for printing from your computer, or send it to teachers, grandparents and caregivers. Not only that, you can also save your personalized templates, organize them into folders for different child or different category/theme and do a backup, which can be restored if you accidentally deleted the app.
The number of templates available in this app is more than sufficient for my use at the moment but if you have a particular template you want to be included in a future update of the app, you can email it to the developer from within the app itself. One suggestion I have for the app is to add the ability to enlarge the font size for when I want to use a text without an image.
With Custom Boards Premium, the possible uses are endless; it is so easy to prepare a professional-looking visual quickly and to share it afterwards. Having such a convenient tool for making customized learning materials for kids who thrive on visual cues is truly a godsend for busy parents and therapists. I highly recommend this versatile app.
Custom Boards is currently on sale at its lowest $19.99 for Better Speech and Hearing Month, making it even more worthwhile to own it now. Check out the video demo before purchasing. (The video is showing a previous version of the app. The version being reviewed has more templates added.)
Category: Education
Please use the App Store link provided below if you decide to get this app. The cost is the same but a small portion of your purchase helps to support the iMums. Thank you!
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Custom Boards- Premiumby Smarty EarsCategory: Education, Medical Requirements: Compatible with iPadThirdGen, iPadMini4G, iPad 2 3G, iPadFourthGen, iPadThirdGen4G, iPad WiFi, iPadFourthGen4G, iPadMini, iPad 2 WiFI, iPad 3G Size: 532.26 MB |
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Screenshots for iPad
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Grace
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Alison, Amanda, Grace and Mary are four mothers from different parts of the world dedicated to educating parents about the best digital stories, educational apps, fun games and technology products available for their children. We also offer the latest news in apps for kids, interesting articles, developer interviews, free apps and regular giveaways!
We are new enough to the world of autism and get little to no services and I was struggling to create visual schedules, I splashed out on custom boards and I have to say I love it. It really makes it so easy to create visual schedules and pecs pictures. I’m not using it to it’s full potential yet but already I love it. It’s like visuals for Dummies (me) Thanks Smarty Ears :-)