Using Video Modeling to Teach Social Skills

Video modeling, the use to use of videos of adults or children performing specific actions or tasks, has become widely used to teach children with autism how to do a variety of social and other skills. There are some commercially available videos, but many people have begun to make their own videos specifically tailored to their child and the skill they want to teach. Technology has come so far in the past few years which has made this technology much more accessible and easy to use.

Videos can be used to teach children how to play games by videotaping other people playing the game. Many believe that video modeling is an effective teaching tool because children with autism many times are highly attentive to visual stimuli and readily mimic actions they see on videos. I’ve seen videos be extremely effective with children with autism in teaching a variety of skills. The one important thing to remember, in my opinion, when making videos is to make them as clear as possible and have the people in the video narrate their actions as well as making them slightly exaggerated to draw the child’s attention to the salient details that you would like them to attend to. This seems to help make the videos more effective.