Research Brief #4: Activity Schedules
by Holly Whittenburg, Whitney Ham, & Jennifer McDonough
Excerpt:
What Are Activity Schedules?
An activity schedule is a type of visual support that provides permanent visual reminders of the order of events or tasks that occur in a given period of time. It describes when an activity will happen, when it will end, and what will occur after that (Ganz, 2007). In other words, activity schedules function similarly to day planners or to-do lists. Although all activity schedules visually organize events or tasks in a sequential manner, there are several different ways to represent items on the schedule and to format the schedule itself. For instance, depending on how the learner makes sense of information, small objects might be used to represent activities on the schedule. Other learners might benefit from simple photograph/ picture and word pairings to label activities, while others might use a more traditional written or typed to-do list. Activity schedules can be located in one particular spot, or they can be portable, by using a clipboard or binder for a paperbased schedule or a smart phone or tablet for an electronically-based one. (Download PDF or Word Document above for the full article.)