Speech-language pathologists and special education professionals are working with an increasing number of bilingual students. Schools must provide culturally and linguistically appropriate instruction for all special learners! The limited availability of published materials for speakers of languages other than English makes this a difficult task.

Picture Master Language Software is a major breakthrough for professionals who work with children from bilingual backgrounds. First of all, the program includes almost 18,000 picture images. Simple line art, realistic line art, photographs, and animated illustrations are used to create picture boards that can be displayed on the screen or printed out. The program comes with real speech in English, Spanish, French, and German. Speech in Mandarin, Japanese, Vietnamese, and other languages can also be obtained. The program was developed by the Assistive Technology Engineering Lab and is published by Academic Communication Associates.

When students click on a picture, they hear speech. The animation feature can also be activated by clicking on items. Speech and text can be easily changed back and forth between languages when more than one language is used in instruction.

Although other picture display program are available, users of Picture Master Language Software will rarely need to purchase supplemental picture libraries from other companies and they won't need an add-on program for speech. Moreover, the "synthesized speech" typically used with picture board creation program is something you won't have to deal with ever again if you use Picture Master Language Software.  Academic Communication Associates now uses real speech in all software publications.

The program features images in a variety of styles! It even includes photographs!

Picture Master Language Software includes real speech that was created by native speakers. Users can change the speech or text for any item. Teachers, instructional assistants, and even students can learn to add words to the program. Students with special learning needs often have difficulty responding to "static pictures." How do you teach a word such as "lift" if a picture shows no movement? The animation feature in Picture Master Language Software shows words in action! 

The speech, animation, and page-linking functions make it possible to create on-screen learning activities. Users can easily link pages to create activities consisting of a series of pages. Users can even set up pages so that students move to a new page each time that they respond correctly to a task item. Users don't need to have programming skills to link pages.

What is really exciting about this program is that it truly allows users to customize lessons. If you are teaching in Spanish and need to change the speech because of "dialect" differences, the change is easy to make. You can use the program to teach vocabulary, synonyms, antonym, word definitions, and other word-related skills. You can have children match printed words with pictures. You can create just about any type of worksheet that you want to create!

The program comes with hundreds of background scenes so that users can teach vocabulary in context. Slide pictures of nouns on top of the background scene and have students talk about them. Add pictures of animals to a park scene or pictures of transportation vehicles to a city scene. The possibilities are unlimited.

It is important to distinguish between Picture Master Language Software and Picture Master Board Designer. Both programs work equally when creating "picture boards." Picture Master Board Designer, however, does not have speech, animation, or page-linking functions. Foreign language text databases, however, are included that make it easy to create picture boards with labels in English or the student's home language.

The preliminary text and speech files for Spanish, French, and German are included free with the English edition of Picture Master Language Software as part of the promotional offer. The foreign language databases are likely to go through changes over the next few years as the programs is used throughout the world.

Symbols from the Library of International Picture Symbols (LIPS) are featured in the "simple symbol" component of the picture library. The simple symbols in the program are already being used widely in programs for children with augmentative communication needs in various parts of the world. Drawings and photographs showing foods and other vocabulary items from a variety of cultures are included.

Users of the Unlimiter Bluebird AAC device can download speech to the device for boards that they create using Picture Master Language Software..

Picture Master Language Software is part of an international project to develop bilingual resources for individual with special learning needs. In addition to developing books and instructional resources for Spanish-speaking children, Academic Communication Associates is working to develop resources and training materials for speakers of various other languages.

Although millions of dollars were spent to develop Picture Master Language Software with Speech, the complete program with almost 18,000 images, real speech,  animation, and page-linking functions is only $295.00. Users interested only in creating and printing out communication boards can use Picture Master Board Designer ($159.00), a smaller version of the program.

Academic Communication Associates has been involved in the development of bilingual materials for over two decades. In collaboration with the Assistive Technology Engineering Lab, a variety of bilingual software materials will become available for speakers of English, Spanish, Mandarin, Vietnamese, and other languages. Books and instructional resources designed for use with the program are being created. The Book of Picture Symbols for Everyday Communication, developed by the Assistive Technology Engineering Lab, has already been published by Academic Communication Associates.

A special website display  for Picture Master Software programs and resources is already online at http://www.picturemastersoftware.com.

Picture boards, game boards, and animation samples are displayed on the site.  
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The product is available from Academic Communication Associates, P.O. Box 4279, Oceanside, CA 92052-4279. Website: www.acadcom.com.