Touchchat with wordpower parent handout how to#
They don’t know how to string words together independently to produce a comment. These students can’t generate these comments because they don’t know how to navigate to the weather page or the descriptions page. They contain phrases like “gorgeous day” or “raining cats and dogs” or “it’s so loud”.
They might be able to easily tell us in morning circle what the weather looks like outside the window each morning – but conversations about the weather never consist simply of “sunny”. When there is a storm at night, they don’t know how to comment on it or to describe it because they have never been taught this. They also don’t know how to say the friend’s name because they’ve never been taught how to navigate to the people section of their system. So, when they see a friend in the street they don’t know how to say “hello” because they have never been shown how to navigate to it independently in their AAC system or because they can only say hello after an expectant pause and a few hints or they can only say hello in the heavily scripted routine of morning circle. This means that the students usually don’t know how to use it outside the morning circle session and definitely not outside of school. Additionally, because it is stored under the category called “school” it implies it is only used at school. However, these scaffolds don’t exist in other situations – and the morning circle vocabulary doesn’t get used in other situations. This highly scripted situation also usually contains a strong routine and lots of expectant pauses – which scaffold students to do well during that period. On this page they can greet their classmates, talk about the weather and make comments about who is at school today. Students in these classrooms go to class in the morning and their systems are often already on the morning circle page – or they are prompted by someone to navigate to the page. One day I’ll write a blog post about morning circle – but in the meantime I’ll use this as an example of where an activity display lets us down.
core vocabulary or PODD.Īs an example, I’ve seen lots of students in classrooms who have a special page for their morning circle under a category called “school”.
So – we need to make sure that every AAC user is allowed to explore and access the whole vocabulary in a comprehensive communication system e.g. Sequenced Social Scripts (Burkhart & Musselwhite, 2001) are one of my favourite starter activities to get people really motivated and excited about the power of communication.īut the problem with these activity or specific displays is that they don’t develop overall language. We understand that this is a good starting point for some people – they can be highly motivating and using this approach we can experience a lot of success, which is great for all of us. We realise that many people start using Augmentative and Alternative Communication with scripted or topic pages. In our original presentation it actually said “don’t focus on creating custom pages for specific activities” but we shortened it for the poster – which may have created some of the confusion! So I wanted to clarify what we meant when we said “Don’t create custom pages for specific activities”. There’s been a few comments and questions about one of the “Don’t” statements. (The “we” in there is myself and David Niemeijer from AssistiveWare). My last blog post was about a Do’s and Don’ts of AAC Poster that we made up for International AAC Awareness Month. International AAC Awareness Month: Do’s and Don’ts of AAC Poster Aim for language development: Don’t create custom pages for specific activities Do’s and Don’ts of AAC: Pulling It All Together
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