Day Three

AAC Myths that are important to remember:
*AAC does not impede speech and language development.
*Children and adults do not need to match or identify pictures to develop AAC skills.
*No one has to start with a paper based or low tech AAC system before moving on to a high tech system.
*There are absolutely no cognitive or behavioural prerequisites to use AAC.
*Access to the "hardware" of AAC is only the first step. The teaching, intervention, and support that follows is the critical piece.

"I know what he/she is trying to say/means." - not doing our job when this happens as when this student goes out into the community we are disadvantaging them as others won't be able to understand them. 
Every child has a voice, we need to help them find a way to let the rest of us know what it is saying.


Assignment #1 in Proloquo2go:
Laurianne and I chose Ruby to be the subject for our assignment. It was nice to collaborate with someone new and discover more of Proloquo2go's features (Thank you for the help Barb!). The challenge was to think of how to write directions of a game/activity as if we were the person reading the directions for the first time. Also thinking of all of the words/phrases that the child using AAC (in this case Ruby) would need in order to fully participate in the game/activity.
I'm looking forward to finishing this up in the morning and seeing what activities the other groups have created.
While this is our first time using the program, the amount of time spent for one activity has been rather extensive. If there was a student who relied on this program to communicate, it would take a lot of planning and programming to ensure that they had access to all of the words/phrases they required to articulate what they wanted to say. The time it takes to do that is however priceless as seen in the videos of Enrique, Nick and Ruby. There is already a student that has come up in conversation that I can foresee this being an extremely beneficial and life altering program for.