DAY ONE - afternoon

In the afternoon, we talked about communication and what it takes to communicate effectively. The 3 components necessary for communication are: (1) having a communication parnter/joint attention, (2) a message/content, and (3) common language. We take communication for granted and how easy or difficult it may be. We find out very quickly when we are trying to communicate with someone who does not speak the same language. Communicating can be very difficult for students who cannot speak or need help to keep focus while trying to communicate. We looked at the Proloquo2Go app. This app assists with communication by speaking for someone. You will need to personalize the categories and content, but it is a very good app to help people communicate who cannot speak to communicate. This app provides the categories to create sentences, for example, "I want a drink of water." If someone who cannot communicate on their own wanted to say this, they would choose and tap different categories and words/pictues to create the sentence, then the app will speak the sentence for the person. I found a YouTube demo. This demo is froma mother with a non-verbal toddler and she shows how she has personalized the categories for her child.