About
About Picto-Selector
Picto-Selector is a free tool for creating visual schedules. It is used by many teachers and parents. But there are also reports of people using it in daycare for elderly people.
The download contains over 34000 pictos (images) translated to English, Dutch, German, French, Danish and Spanish. (Some pictos are also translated to Arabic, Swedish, Italian, Portuguese, Brazilian and Indonesian)
Picto-Selector makes creating visual schedules easier by:
- Fast search options to find the needed pictures
- Automatic sizes, depending on the number of rows and columns
- Reuse of earlier created schedules
With Picto-Selector the time consuming cut, paste and editing in Word is over.
At the main screen picto sheets can be viewed and added. Each sheet can be printed. Pictos can easily be selected from a list and placed between existing pictos, this makes it extremely easy to alter existing picto sheets.
History
Our son was diagnosed with autism in 2007. When we found out we were looking for ways to help him to get a better grasp on the world around him. One very effective way we found was the use of visual schedules.
Creating visual schedules turned out to be a lot of work. It was quite frustrating to resize and align images with Microsoft Word. To simpify this work Picto-Selector was born.
At first the pictos of Sclera were bundled with Picto-Selector. Later other picto resources were added.
Many volunteers have spend time in translating Picto-Selector.
Intro video
Who I am
My name is Martijn van der Kooij. Married with Linda and we have three great children. I’ve been a software developer since 1996. My experience is with Windows software (Delphi and C#) and i’m working with PHP and javascript since 2014.
We live in Stadskanaal (Netherlands).
What is a Visual Schedule?
Visual schedules are excellent tools in the learning process for people with certain developmental disorders such as Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDD) or Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD).
These people are usually excellent visual thinkers. They understand and retain better the information presented to them visually.
Visual schedules are based on the sequential presentation of a series of tasks, clear and simplified form, using for this normally pictograms to facilitate the schematic representation without unnecessary additional information.
Visual schedules help these people understand the situations and know what is expected of them, thereby reducing the anxiety that generates the new and unexpected. With visual schedules you help them to anticipate the various events that will happen. Using this type of schedules you help them to give an order to their world and improve aspects of their emotional wellbeing.
About Sclera
The sclera website came to be because there was a need for new pictograms in Terninck, a day centre and home for adults with a mental disability. The people there used the pictogenda to offer them structure from day to day. The pictograms used in pictogenda are black and white.
Bart Serrien, caregiver in the day centre, had the idea to redo the old pictograms on computer. In the same style new ones could be designed.
Pretty soon the questions started pouring in for more and new pictograms. Bart had the idea to translate the pictograms to other languages so more people could be helped.