 I'm going to put on my video because I think perhaps that's the problem and I'm going to now share my screen and I'm just going to take a little peek again to look at who the participants are. I feel like you're all here. Thank you very much. So my name is not as it is shown in the in the list. I'm really happy to be with you here today. And what I'm going to do is share with you a presentation that I originally gave at the inclusive education conference. And in Canada, actually it wasn't in Canada because it was an image and I'm just used to calling it the Canada conference last October. And the way this has come about is Kate, and Kate, and then some of her friends from those of you who are part of this Edmonton speech round, Edmonton's own speech rounds asked me to actually come and talk to them. At the beginning of the month and the technology didn't work so well that time. So what we decided to do is to try it again. And for me to do this presentation using different technological base. So we have our fingers crossed. I'd like you to all say the technology prayer with me today to make sure that this works. I've been popped off this twice now. So I don't know what that's about. It's not happened to me like that before. So now said, what I'm going to do is I'm going to share with you a presentation on creating accessible communication environments. For some of you on the webinar today, I know that some of this will be repetition old information, but maybe you'll have heard it in a little different way. For some of you I'm hoping it will be new and I am just hoping regardless of whether it's older new information that you'll take a few things out of today's session. So welcome to you all I'm very glad you're here. For those of you who don't know me, I've been working in the field that assistive technology augmented an alternative communication and special education since the days of Apple to e computers and echo speech synthesizers so that's me. I, in the left, when I was working at Elf Memorial child development center, many, many, many moons ago to working in our today's ubiquitous ubiquitous. I had world to doing some my doctor research in a AC, where I looked at lived experience of people who speak with speech generating devices. I'm not going to go through all of this, but I'll just tell you that I've worked in lots of different kinds of places, special schools, head start programs, inclusive preschools. I was at the a assistive device service at the eye can or at the Glen Rose when we sort of made the eye can center. Did some work with Albert education went back did this that doctoral says I was talking about and now I am as probably most of you know, working with the low incidence, provincial low incidence team for the RCSD and my role as well as my colleague. Wendy qua who is unfortunately not very well these days so we're hoping Wendy's going to be feeling better soon. Our, our responsibility is in the area of supporting kids with complex communication needs. Alright, so who are you I'm not going to spend a lot of time doing this. I see that there's a, I think most of you are probably speech pathologist. So that's exciting. I think maybe there's a couple of you who might be occupational therapist. So, thank you for joining me. I'm really glad to see you all here. Somebody's taking over my screen. Please don't. Alright, so, and this is what we're going to be talking about today. So again, many of you have already heard me probably talk about who are students with complex communication needs. We're going to be reviewing that again today because it seems to me that these definitional kinds of things and getting a common language and common understanding of who we're talking about is really critical for moving forward and Alberta. And so I keep revisiting this every almost every time I talk, we're going to talk what is augmented and alternative communication and I'm sure that for most of you that will be review, but if not, that's great. And if you have any questions about that, but I'm also tell you right now that I am trying to monitor the chat a little bit while I'm speaking with you. So if you do have a question that's coming up as we're talking pop it into the chat. I'm going to talk about what is meant by a communicatively accessible environment and what we can do to create those environments. We likely won't get very deep into the communication Bill of Rights today, but I will mention it again as we finish our time together. All right, I need to pay homage to many, many people who and this the who's influence and inspiration as I say here has helped go into these present presentation. And there are, as I said, many, but the you're going to hear me talk about Stephen Vaughn-Techner a great deal as we go through the next two hours together. And his work, I hope many of you have had the time to listen to the talk that he's done for us. Provincially, there are two sessions of Stephen Vaughn-Techner that are up on the ERLC site again at the end of this. I'll show you where that link is and his influence will be seen heavily as we progress through our time together. So, who are we talking about the definition that we have adopted in Alberta for who are people with complex communication needs is this. It's interesting. It's a term that's used fairly commonly in the field, although I must admit that Dr. Vaughn-Techner has rather taken me to task on on the term and I do have some queries about it now but we're just getting to a common understanding so I don't want to start making terms around. This is a definition that I found actually in a paper from Australia by Terry and all in 2004 and it seems to be one that works fairly well. And so people who have complex communication needs and of course it's not just children and youth. There are adults who acquire children and youth who have complex communication needs continue to do so in their adulthood. There are also adults who have acquired challenges that will have them in the need of augmentative and alternative communication so falling into the complex communication needs domain, I guess. They're unable to use speech to communicate effectively alone so that means that they may well use some speech but not they don't have enough useful speech to basically make their needs in their daily context. And so they need some they and their communication partners as which is something that I really liked about this definition benefit from using augmentative and alternative communication methods, and it might be temporarily an example that I'd like to say is someone perhaps on a trach or something might need AC or a letterboard for a little while, or maybe a child who is significantly delayed in their speech might use AC supports temporarily as they are gaining more and more speech skills. So that it might not be a permanent solution but for some people it is certainly part of their permanent communication system. And I highlighted the last bit it perhaps we don't need it anymore but when we were first started the RCSB, provincial RCSB work. We asked people to send us some numbers on how many kids they had that had complex communication needs in their areas and people were with good intentions, sending numbers that included kids who are deaf and hard of hearing. Now, certainly hearing limitation may require different kinds of communication, for example, perhaps sign language or other kinds of communication supports, but hearing alone does not render one having complex communication needs. So who are these kids? I'm just going to pop all these pictures up for the sake of time. It might be the child on the bottom left, who is our sort of traditional child with complex communication needs, she's using two head switches to access what back in the day I think that was a vantage. I'm not exactly sure. I can't remember. So people who have physical disabilities that causes them not to be able to breathe and articulate in the coordinated manner to allow them to have speech. We'll go to the opposite side of the screen. The young lady many of you may recognize as Carly Fleishman, who has autism and speaks using an iPad with text-to-speech software. So Carly has learned to type to talk, and if you want to go and listen, I'm again assuming that many of you have been there. She has a blog and a webpage, Carly Fleishman, where she's interviewed some pretty famous people. To the young lady at the top with Down syndrome, who I lovingly refer to as sort of my yes girl. So she may have a few words, but when you're asking her some questions like what did you do last night, she doesn't have enough to tell me. So then you often we've started 20 questions game. Did you go shopping? Yes. Did you go to the mall? Yes. Did you buy blue dress? Yes. Did you visit the queen? Yes. So she's learned to say yes because she doesn't have anything, any other way to expand her communication if she says no, where's she going to go without AAC. And also if she says yes, we'll probably quit bugging her. So she might be one. The young man who I, in the orange shirt, I put him up as an example of a child who may have severe aprexia of speech, so he may talk with Vowell. He may have a hard time understanding him. Perhaps he needs some kind of AAC support again for the long term or for short term. The little guy in the middle is the child that I'm putting there. Maybe has autism, maybe has some other kinds of challenging behavior that he is using to communicate. And so giving AAC supports may help him to communicate in ways that we are more happy with than the behavior that he's showing there. But I put the young lady, the young lady at the bottom in the wheelchair, which is the young lady with rats. And we know that we're understanding more and more about certain conditions that we used to believe also meant that there was a cognitive impairment as well as a physical impairment. And now with augmentative and alternative communication solutions, we are learning more and more that young ladies with rats and other groups are actually able to communicate if we take away some of the barriers that their body provides. And then finally up in the top corner, probably the kids that I've worked with most in my career are the kids that have a little of everything. So Teresa Iacono talks about the thing about people or children with complex communication needs is that their challenges tend to come in multiples. And certainly that is often the case, often the children that I have worked with and probably you as well may have some hearing impairment, they may have cortical visual impairment, as well as having severe speech impairment. So there are probably other groups that are missing here, but I just wanted to go through this to talk about the diversity of the kids that we serve. And yet they all have complex communication needs and they all require augmentative and alternative communication and typically assistive technologies of some type to support communication but also and importantly so their language development. All right, so, okay, just being able to speak is not having. So, just because these kids can't say something to us that doesn't mean that they don't have something to say, and that it's our job to help them to say it whatever manner is possible for them. Von Tetschner as I alluded I was going to speak probably a lot about him. This is a quote from the talk that he gave to us last year. And as he said it's been demonstrated many times that children with limited speech can communicate for a variety of purposes, provided they are given the means and the opportunity and what I'm going to talk about. Pretty much for the rest of this time together is those two things the means and the opportunity. So the means are augmentative and alternative communication so AC systems do not rely on speech and I should put in there alone this is the definition from Ash of 2004. They informed uses all forms of communication, including oral speech that are used to express ourselves so at this point if we are in a face to face meeting I would say how many of you actually use AC in your daily lives so I'm going to throw that up to the chat and if anyone wants to respond. How many of you use AC and explain to me if you will please what kind of AC you use. So if you can all find the chat window. Just click into there and put a couple of your responses to what it what if any AC you use in your daily life. Texting. Nice. Thank you. Email. Thanks River. Anyone else notes. Yes, anybody ever passed a note in class. Thank you, Alana, right exactly. So I will leave it at that. Aha, modeling on a student's device. There you go. So you're using it as a model writing. Yes, exactly. Texting. So, if we're thinking about communication that doesn't include speech, we, I bet all of us texts fairly often these days. In fact, I think my daughter doesn't really know that her phone is used for speaking. It's a text device. We might draw a picture for somebody if they're not understanding something. So the point is we all use AC in our lives from passing a note to somebody sending a text to drawing a picture to maybe we'll say something with our words but our face can tell a different story. But for people that rely, it's one thing to use a multiple modality of communication, but for people who need AC, they rely more heavily on some of those other forms as speech is not their primary form for us speeches and natural primary form and as I said, a system AC systems can augment existing communication skills. So maybe I have some speech, maybe I'm a pretty good nonverbal communicator and I'm going to augment that or maybe there's going to be a total alternative to speech where in some kids have really very limited speech and so that's going to be an alternative. So both of those things might be a reason and a way to use AC. Again, probably most of you, this is very old news, but it's important to make sure that we're all on the same page. So AC has in the two ways of thinking about it, non aided AC, which would be speech, the speech that people have even if it's a limited amount of speech or even if it's quite challenging to understand that's part of their AC system manual signs. I used to have American Sign Language there and that dot but I don't put ASL there anymore because that's very, very, very rare experience that I've had that someone who is, has complex communication needs is going to be in an immersive ASL environment. I have taught many kids a few signs, but it's a few signs, not a dedicated language system which ASL is so but we using manual signs as part of an AC system is very common and can be quite useful as long as there's more than just those few signs in their child's language system and gestures. Again, we all use gestures and not those are so non aided things are things that you can do by just your body. You don't have to carry other things with you aided communication can be the writing and typing that you talked about texting. It can be using symbols, whether those are word based symbols or picture based symbols, and it can be devices so AC is a lot more than speech generating devices and always should be a lot more than speech generating devices. Because when we're thinking AC we want to put a system together, just like we have multiple modes to express ourselves so do, so do that. Yeah, there it is. So will the people who were trying to support. All right, we need to think about that. An important thing. And one of the reasons that I'm such a fan of on tetanus is he's talking about AC the provision of AC and the use of AC to to young people or people with complex communication needs is that it is a developmental pathway to communication and to language competence. So kids need to develop their communication skills and their language skills and competencies and AC is the pathway to doing that. Some of you maybe again many of you will be familiar with what the literature and traditionally has said in the AC world. What makes a competent communicator and communication competence. The idea of it actually came from linguistics. Delheim because they were talking about in the in the world of speaking people that we all needed to have linguistic competence. So we needed to understand our language system and how to use that language. And then Delheim came around and said, yeah, well, there's more than that to being a competent communicator. You need to know more than just the linguistic structure. You also need to know the social so that social. Social linguists came about and started talking about the importance of understanding the social niceties of language and also how to use language strategically. Janet flight took that notion from linguistics and social linguistics and she further defined it for people who use AC. So, and and in looking at those competencies we can see that it is a not not an inconsequential task for a person who requires AC to be a competent communicator. So firstly they have to understand the linguistic code. So that's then they usually that it's not only the oral code that we all have to understand the linguistic code of the oral language that they're immersed in, but they also have to understand the linguistic structure of whatever kind of language system they have so there's sort of two things going on there. Strategic, or maybe I'll go over to operational operational is we are operational competence if you think about us as speakers is that we need to push the air to our vocal tracks and move our articulators are mouths around to operate our voice boxes. Shall we say that's probably not a really good way to say it. So that operational competence for us of our human bodies comes relatively early on and almost seems to happen without anybody really teaching us for an aided communicator. Operational competence demands that they have to figure out how to run their AC system so that might be turning on a device managing the volume and finding out where things are on the system where they're where they're like how their language system is set up. So there's a great operational demand for using an AC system that needs to be thought about strategically typically people, no matter what kind of AC system you have unless it's a suppose unless it's an alphabet system. If you have symbol based system, you will never have all the words that you may want to say on your device because there's too many words in that English language if you can spell them and if you know how to spell then perhaps you can say whatever you want to say. So typically people who use AC have to think strategically about what words do I have here and what can I really say, using the words that I know that I have or some other kind of strategies for getting around that. So out of strategic competence that I've really noticed a great deal in my research is how to manage the time space, the time continuum, I will say, when you're using a speech generating device I actually just have a new paper out in communication today that's talking about that out of time in the classroom, because no matter how competent you are as an aided communicator, it still takes far more time to speak to a device than it does for us who are oral speakers so the strategic strategies around communication are also really important. And then there's competent communicators have to figure out the whole social milieu and how to be appropriately social and read social cues using their devices and one of the things again with that that I found is it's often hard to think about the right facial expressions or even to be socially engaged when there's a screen between so we have to think about all of these different pieces. If you're interested more in genocides competencies, the original paper I wanted I can send it to you and also they've done an update of this. I think about 2012 or so where they added a few more things. I share this with you today to really highlight that this is a challenging task that we have to help our young students with complex communication needs navigate. It's not just throwing the magic talking box in front of them and voila, there's all of these things that need to be thought about attended to plan for and actually practice in implementation and I often and rather dazzled when I think about all of the pieces that have to go together to make a competent communicator so I hope. Yet and yet they they and yet they persist and and we have competent communicators in our midst which is lovely. Again, so going back to the two things that I said we've talked about the means now the means is really providing an AC system, a multimodal AC system which often a speech generating device will be part of, but they also need to think about the opportunity. So opportunities matter greatly in the day when I first started there was sort of all kinds of hoops that kids had to jump through to sort of be seen as candidates for AC and we had pretty and it goes what I talked a little bit about young ladies with wet syndrome I was certainly one of the people who, you know, girls with rats will probably never be able to use this as the generating device well now we've seen that that is totally not the case and many will be able to. Important thing is that we don't want to have low expectations and we don't want to say a child with blah will never blah without giving them every opportunity that we can and presuming competence and again, this is something that's being talked about a whole lot. And I know that that word presuming competence that has been a challenge to some one of the ways that I like talking about this is like Kate a her and does which is presuming potential, we're going to presume that every child does communicate is able and also if given the right opportunities and supports will have the potential to be a competent communicator if we presume they have that potential and we do all that we can to make it so. And if we were wrong in our presumptions. There's not a problem but if we presume that they probably can't and don't give them opportunity. That's where we're going to be darn sure that they can't because if you never get the opportunity to do it, you are pretty likely never going to be able to. All right, so again, presuming competence is that sort of contract between teacher and student SLP and students parents and child to choose the most optimistic stance possible. One of my favorite articles by built in and Burke if you are on presumed competence again, you shoot me an email I'd be happy to shoot you back that article to read in your copious spare time. Okay, so here we go today we understand that no one is to anything to benefit from a support. All right, so I'm going to take a little pause now to see if there's any questions or comments or most I'm pausing because I'm talking way too fast and I need to, I need to take a little positive my voice. I don't see any comments so I shall move forward. What I want to move to now is the whole idea of language development and again you can see we've got my favorite guy as a quote that we if we think about AAC is a path to language development. We have to kind of look at what language development is about and how we can actively support that for our kids. So, language development process by which children come to share their, their cultures means of communication which is typically mainly spoken and in for all of us, some extent signed. So, that's that that's what we're really thinking that we that's a critical thing that we need all of our children to engage in that language development. In order to develop language. Children need to have some support so they are active participants. Bontechner is heavily in the camp of Thomas fellow and those who talk about usage based language development. So, even though children are actively engaged in investigating, they can't create language themselves. They need guidance from a language supportive environment, and he goes on to say that in that language supportive environment. We need to internalize the practices of the culture that they're in whether they're in a fine language culture or an oral language culture, or in our cases that we have to create a culture that is a multimodal culture by observing and interacting with other adults and children so developing languages of very social, very interactive, very active process. Again, this is sort of the anti-skinarian world language doesn't happen by imitation repetition, but on constructing and figuring out new ways to use language based on language experiences. So I'm going to just put this that same quote up with a little bit of a different flavor for some reason. In the world of special education, we seem to be still hanging on Skinner and man's in tax and some of the things that Skinner talked about when he was trying to come up with his theory of language development. In the non-special education world, we've left Skinner pretty far behind in language development and we've moved to thinking about other people like Chomsky and Brunner and Vygotsky, who are really talking about construction of language and that it's more than stimulus response. And repetition and imitation that helps kids to develop language. There's more going on. So again, I could do another whole session about this, but I just want to challenge us to say we need to think about what we know about how what we've learned since 1957 when Skinner wrote his book about language development and think and apply that knowledge to kids with disabilities as well as to typically developing kids because it's all language development, right? Oops, sorry. I'm going to try and move myself forward there. Okay, so what does that mean then when we're thinking about focusing on language development and usage based language development and interaction? What does this mean for the kids that we're working with kids with complex communication needs? Environment matters. And that's the case for all kids. For sure. All kids need a language supported environment to develop language. If they didn't, the wild boy of Arian or whatever, or kids could, if they didn't need a language rich environment, kids would just talk, but they don't just talk. If a child is left alone without a language rich environment, they're going to not be able to speak or they will very minimally have environmentally deprived language. So what is involved in creating a language supportive environment? First of all, a community of speakers, people that engage and share the same kind of language that you do. And speakers could be signers, a community of signers. If you're a child who is deaf and is in a sign language environment, I'm using the word speakers here as those people who are using, expressing with the language and understanding the language that you're immersed in and trying to learn. So there needs to be many different language environments. So the language needs to be at home in the neighborhood and school and typically developing kids or kids that are going to up to be speakers primarily. Engaging language everywhere you go at the grocery store everywhere. There's their immersed in a many diverse language environments. And they have many different communication partners that includes both adults and peers that will support their growth and development of a speaking child speech, child with sign. Hopefully they will have many different communication partners that will engage in their language to support it. I think that's sometimes a problem as well. But those are the essence of a supportive language environment. For typically developing kids, they have lots of their access into this is ensured because they have numerous communication interactions. And they have all kinds of ordinary stapled already. So many of you might know that I'm a new grandma. And I'm already watching as my daughter and her partner are talking to Logan and interacting with him and scaffolding already every little movement that he makes. And it's really meaning to it. There's so many supports that we have for kids to develop language when they're they develop typically when they don't develop typically. For example, if Logan doesn't respond back in the way that they're expecting him to expect, he might not go on to develop that rich language. And there's a credit big research base. Well, maybe it's not big. There's a research base that talks about kids with cerebral palsy if they their parents don't recognize their signs because their bodies aren't working in the same way. Those children tend to be environmentally deprived of language because of the scaffolding of their language growth doesn't happen in the same way because they're sort of out of sync with their parents. So, often again, this is from a really nice article for in the preschool environment. So, if any of you are working in preschool environments, Von Tetschner and his student, I think his first name is Christine. I can't begin to say what her last name is. I just want to point out that often that communicative access those kind of rich environments aren't always recognized when children we're expecting our children to be aided communicators. And this is a Gail Porter. I'm sure many of you've seen it in different iterations. But so, typically developing kids at the top, the kids that are going to develop language, they get lots of spoken language in from multiple partners and all kinds of contexts. And after a couple of years, spoken language comes out for the kids that we're expecting to use aided language. If we only get spoken language in the question then how do they get those that immersion in aided language. And so what Gail Porter and others have said is that we need to do both aided language in and spoken language in so that we can expect aided language to come out with spoken language. And I'm again, pretty sure that probably most of you have heard of this kind of notion that you can, it's pretty difficult to expect a child to use an AAC system if they've never seen anyone in their environment use an AAC system. Never mind being immersed in the AAC system the way that kids are immersed in oral language. I think I said enough about that. So, why does this happen? And there are restricted number of communication situations where kids are going to see and use their AAC systems. Typically, when I've seen it sadly too often where somebody knows that I'm coming to the class and you know that the communication boards will come out or you know the communication device will come out. But is it really used in multiple situations all throughout the day? I'm sure limited communication partners. We're going to talk a lot about partners and then the availability of communication aids. So I'm going to go through each one of these in more detail. Right. We're doing all right. So I talked about the AAC as the means. And now I'm going to talk about accessible communication environments as the real opportunity. And again, straight from Vaughn Tetschner and his PhD student, Christine, a communicatively accessible environment. First of all, recognizes the child's need for aided communication and provides aided language supports. That doesn't mean provides a device. It doesn't mean provides. It means that they're giving aided language support that could be a combination of kind of symbol supports, communication boards and devices. But those that people recognize that a child who has complex communication needs this and they are provided that they recognize that the child has a need for communication partners who support that active use of aided language in all aspects of life. So that one right there is a much harder thing to tackle and to provide, I would argue, then the first one, but it's important. And then guidance and support to use AAC productively and I really like that word creatively. So to create kids that are going to be risk takers just like our kids when they're learning to our kids just like kids who end up to be talkers when they're learning to use their oral language they might and they do over generalize and they see a kitty down the road and that their only experience has been with puppies, they'll say puppy. So they're using what language they know creatively and for different purposes. So we need to try and recognize the need for the aided communicator to have that as well. And one is also a big one the last one conscious deliberate scaffolding and intervention efforts by parents teachers and other professionals. So those people need to scaffold the development of the child communication language. And then those of us who are more aware and in the know, in terms of AAC also need to scaffold the scaffolders. So, I'm going to continue on and and talk about this. Recognizing the need. So certainly, all students who don't have sufficient verbal language to meet the needs of their AAC needs a system that offers them at least core vocabulary. That is not only core vocabulary. That is at least core vocabulary. So I'm going to talk about that. And this is kind of a repetition of what I've said before, that we need to think about this as a system, not any one thing. So if you think about these are some quotes from some of the participants in my study, I couldn't do my job without my computer. And speech is very helpful. So talking about a speech generating device, but in the reality I'm five times faster with my communication board. So perhaps the communication board and in a couple of instances I've seen this is a more effective system than is a speech generating device. And then another example from someone who says my speech device is wonderful one for plan communication, but not very good for spontaneous communication. So we need to be thinking about not the speech generating device is sort of the mecca, but as part of the whole and that other ways can be more efficient. And, and I've got an example there of symbols on a pillow or symbols on a flutter board, you can't take a communication device into the swimming pool. So we need to think about providing. Now, I would not, I need to say about that flutter board. I would not provide just those words on a flutter board anymore. That was a long time ago, one that was made up. I would certainly put at least a core vocabulary with some fringe on that at this point we're going to talk about corn fringes a little bit more coming up. But just to think about there are lots of things, lots of ways that hitting on that multimodal approach again. And maybe I can just let this speak for itself. This is a wonderful quote from David Buchelman, who with top Miranda, or probably what many people consider the AC Bible, having a communication device doesn't make you an effective communicator anymore than having a piano makes you a musician. And I think this is something that is a profound quote. Everyone sort of goes, yeah, of course, but I think sometimes all of us forget how much work it really is to help a child learn to be an effective communicator, and that the device itself is not the answer. So what does it take now? Now you're getting a little bit of Cappy Howie, and this is sort of my ideas of how I've put it together. I need to let you know that ideas are always evolving. So I may come back to this in three months or three years and say, oh, we need to change this up again, but this is kind of how I've put it together. So I'd be interested in your thoughts at the end if you would share them about whether that makes sense for you. So what it takes, give me my words, speak to me with my words, teach me to understand and use my words. Give me time, lots of time and waiting, and give my friends my words, peer support and communication circles as well as parents. So I'm going to go through each of these in a little bit more depth. So give me words, but what words? I alluded to this already. Core vocabulary. Again, probably most of you on the webinar today have either seen this or certainly know about this, that 85% of what we actually say we use only about two, there's different numbers that float around around this, but there's only about 200 words that we use for most of our conversation. And we call those core and core words can be used across talking about whether I'm talking about going to the gym or whether I'm talking about doing a webinar or whether I'm talking about my new grandson. I'm going to use many of the same words in each of those places topics and actually it's also consistent around cognitive ability. Small set of simple words that are used frequently and across context, I kind of said that already. And the important thing about core is that there's many parts of speech, not just nouns. In the day, I used to make noun boards up so to play puzzles, I put a piece of puzzle and I put the colors and all these colors probably wouldn't be a bad thing, but I would put on the board, maybe a better way to explain it is to talk about making a communication place map for lunch and we, you know, I'd put cup and bowl and sandwich and cookie and maybe I put like or yucky or maybe I'd put please, but those words cup bowl aren't going to let me talk about the interaction around lunch. It's going to only if anything they have me request cup and a bowl maybe once maybe twice where actually I can point to the cop if I really want it so moving away from having noun heavy boards and our communication systems. vocabulary to thinking about that vocabulary that can be used in any more instances and this is just an example today of the AC field has really embraced core vocabulary. And there isn't a system, I don't think not to be wrong, that isn't heavily based on core vocabulary, whether it's a men speak system, or pro logo or Karen Erickson's core vocabulary which will go into. So, a couple of examples, not mine. We use core vocabulary because it's so flexible. So we take one word different, which is on many core boards. And if we think about in the context of school environment, we can talk about it when we're in the library, I want a different book so different and then you can point to the book. When you're in art class and you're talking about the pictures, your picture is different than mine. So same word different context. You can use it in math in a couple of ways here that different that number is different than that one. So instead of focusing on actually how many numbers. Core vocabulary is actually really powerful in lots of mathematical and science context to get to the understanding and for those of you who are with us with for Aaron Sheldon talk in March. She did a lovely job of talking about descriptive teaching and this is the sort of one of the essence of using core vocabulary well with descriptive teaching. If you haven't seen that webinar, I will show you at the end of this one where you can go back and take a look. So traction, the difference is five different differences still essentially using the same notion of the word, and then my favorite, you know, some guy he's acting different, he's acting differently. So one way and other examples, and this is, this is my big frustration as many of you know with the pro logo assistive where core vocabulary boards is that the word turn is not on it. And in the context of schools and young kids boy you need that word a lot. And here's some examples. Look, turn the page game your turn my turn toy, I want to turn with that toy TV turn turn the channel radio radio or computer or whatever turn it up turn it down, turn it off turn it on. Turn the corner is the car or if you're directing somebody to push your chair or whatever we're going to turn and then turn away turn away from me I don't want to see you talk to the hand so a couple of examples. And I'm sure that you guys can think about lots of other things. I was going to do this try to do this activity but I'm not going to actually try today. Well, hang on. Maybe I'll lie about that. I'll give you an example of an activity. I don't want to put my camera back on because the bandwidth seems to be low. One of this and you can take this some of you have seen it being done. If you haven't seen it being done. It's an activity that I'm sure I didn't think up I borrowed from somebody is I have a bag of things that I take out when I'm doing workshops. And I give each table a thing and I asked them to think about so one of the things in my bag would be a baby doll the other thing in my bag let me see I'll get the sample of it and I do apologize for not being able to show you some of these things but so I've got a baby doll. I've got a mug. I've got a book. I've got a little stuff world. So I passed these things these things around to different tables and I have them write down some words to describe those things. So baby doll might be cute and soft and and the cup might be hard and ugly because it's a ugly looking cup anyway so people write down some words about them. And then I have them pass the thing that they have to the next table to see if they can talk about that same thing using the words that they have written down. Often is not they can't really talk about often is not they can't really talk about the thing that they just passed because the words are too specific. So then I pass out and usually I just pass out Karen Erickson's core board and ask them to see if they can talk about whatever thing they have in front of them using these core vocabulary and it's a nice way to show the power of core and how you can use to talk up in some ways about a whole bunch of different things and that sometimes real specific words get in the way of talking about anything other than that very specific context. So, I'm sorry that I wasn't able to do it a little bit more effectively. Hopefully, if you want to see it sometime. Give me a give me a shout and I can show it to you or maybe we can try this another time when I have more bandwidth I don't know what's quite going on and have to talk to my service providers because this should be better than this. So, some resources for core project core has some and it's just and maybe I'm not going to go project core. This is the work of Karen Erickson and her colleagues. If you haven't been there I highly recommend that you go. They're putting more and more implementation things up all the time as well. They've got some nice little vignettes of different students using core so lots of great resources. You can actually pull down core vocabulary boards. They're such the ones that look like this or in various different configurations. What I like about what Karen's doing now with the core board and this is one that is in symbol sticks. You can print it off in PCS which is board maker and also widget symbols now. So, you can make these core boards match more closely some of the symbol systems that your kids might be using on devices if you want to do that. What I like is she's got the empty cells at the side which remind I hope remind people that this is just the beginning. It's not the end those 32 words are 36 words. Another resource if you haven't been there is the assistive where core classroom. This goes with it. If it were. Pro logo the the app communication app to go to go, but even if you're not using Pro logo. There's lots of great ideas and assistive where core classroom, you have to sign up for this. But so far at least it's free. So I if you're working in a if you haven't explored this I highly recommend it and also it's just a great resource for thinking about language. If you're doing language therapies with kids. And now Toby Donov ox is also, which is another one of the big companies is also got lots of resources on their site for core lesson planning. So as I said, everybody's everybody's all about core. The original core came from the Gail and Tate and hope there's some wonderful resources. If you go to the pattern.net that she's got a variety of webinars that Gail is talking about. And so here's some different things where you can go with Gail core vocabulary starts with men speak systems. And that was really the first of the language systems that really did was really based on this notion of core. I'll just say here that Gail and a variety of other folks are coming to Albert to Edmonton at the first week of September. So if you're interested in learning more about this. Let me know the information will be out for how to register for that very soon. I believe it will be coming out through Arlene Hansen from Prank. Okay, so course great course powerful course flexible you can use it lots of different situations, but we don't want to stop there we want to make sure and there's a really nice. Posting by somebody who you will go to often as we're winding this up Charles Angari practical AAC that talks about why we may really need some some good fringe vocabulary some. So fringe vocabulary is the kind of vocabulary that you don't use as much that might be more specific to a particular activity, or maybe some of our kids have certain fascinations that maybe they only really want to talk to us if we're talking to them about bugs. Well, guess what you might want some words about bugs and some kind of bugs available on in their communication system so that we can engage in and talk to them about things that interest them so we really do want to stand their vocabulary and give them ways the words for today and tomorrow. So we want to grow. If we're thinking about this as language development we need to grow their language so not stop them with a core board but continue to expand and develop and include words that they may want to talk about certain things or. That they often one of the first things that I would use as fringe is people who do you want to talk about or talk with or things that they're really interested in. All right, so this is a thing that's being talked about a lot and something that I certainly believe in. Which is providing students children use with robust language system. So this is Kate of her definition. There are other people that talk about it in different ways. So she's talking about at least 100 words that are understandable predictable, organized in some way, and organizing consistent system. So 100 words gives you enough vocabulary to sort of talk about things or also to be talked to about things to develop language. It's about language development. All right, and here's another version of this from Carol Zangari, and she's talking about linguistically robust systems which is a little bit different than what she's talking about her and I'm going to cross my fingers and go to this and hopefully don't lose you. All right. There we go. Yay. So, a practical AC if there's anybody out there in the participant list that hasn't been to practical AC go to practical AC as soon as you're done with this talk, because there's always wonderful resources there. So this one is an old one you can see from 2014. So that's the other thing there's lots of archives here. And so she's talking about what a linguistically robust system and here's what she's talking about no fewer than 300 core words. So that's a lot of words with lots of different classes and then also for a linguistically robust system, you're going to want to make morphological changes so and you can if any of you are familiar with the newer systems, even, you know, prologos you hold a button down it will start to give you the linguistically correct versions of that word so you can hit the word go and hold it down and we went going and the various different appropriate morphological versions of that word. So, I'm not going to stay here for very long. I just wanted to point out number one to show you practically AC and also to point out another definition of what a linguistically robust system versus a robust language. So, linguistically means you're going to have the linguistic markers and the ways to do derivations of words to make them linguistically correct and appropriate. And it is important when a young person is developing language and becoming a aided communicator. It says something to the world if they can actually create linguistically appropriate sentences, not all the time but thinking about that is something that I think we need to pay some attention to. All right, so again, both core and fringe are needed. I think this is a Pat Miranda I borrowed this from her, where she's talking about having the core as the main characters, but the fringe are bit players but sometimes those bit players can pay a very important part in the in the conversation. All right. So, competent communication partners that you remember that was the other piece that we said that we need in a communicatively accessible environment. So these would be people in the environment who can understand the child's expressive communication and language and can answer in a way that the child understands them that helps them grow their language. This is something that I took from practical AC and kind of adapted a little bit and I know that there's many of you in the in the room I'm going to say online that I've seen this before. So, what I've tried to do to help people understand how the child is expressing themselves, as well as think about a way to encourage them to understand their new language system one that we're introducing as well as another way to say it is to take what is traditionally in the field in a gestural dictionary or communication dictionary, and I just added probably a fourth column. So, what I do, so what does the child do and I my silly example all the time when I'm talking to people face to face is that if I was a child when I was a child at home, and I raised my right shoulder up and down my mom would know that I was thirsty so what I do Kathy raises her shoulder what it means that she's thirsty. What you should do is get her something to drink, and what you should say and model and this is to help us to actually engage with the child communication system, the aided communication system. You should say, Oh, I think you're thirsty, you want to drink, and you could model want to drink or want or, but whatever you decide to say and model this chart helps us to respond consistently, and also to make sure that we are paying attention to all the ways a child is communicating. So that either it's, you know, I won't be putting my shoulder up. Nobody's responding to me. I have a tantrum, break meltdown, start crying on the floor, or I just put even trying to ask for something to drink because nobody here understands. So, this is a way that we can document how the child's communicating and also helps us to think about intentionally how we respond so that you can help to grow their language. There are some ways that I gather information for that so ways that I gather what they do and what it means, or encourage people to do as well is to use the communication matrix and I hope many of you are familiar with the communication matrix. It is a way to gather. Yeah, this worries me. This means to me that they probably won't be free for long but anyway that I got to get rid of some of this nonsense is up here. All right, man, and sorry, we don't want to do that. My computer is fighting back. Okay, goodbye. Sorry people. That was a nice little. I just trying to get rid of this. Anyway, I won't take a lot of time to go into the communication matrix right now. I think there is a little webinar that are little movie that you can look at here. And I think probably one of the things that I'm going to do in the next not too distant future is go back and do a webinar on this to help people to understand it but it's a way to gather information about how a child currently is communicating. You could use that information to fill in my chart fill in the information the way I provided it or in some other way. I'm also encouraging people to use it as way of monitoring growth. So, if we did a communication matrix at the beginning of the year, maybe in January and maybe at the end of the year, you've got repeated measures so that you can actually think about some growth that the child is having. Mostly I want to do it to understand how that child is communicating and so that all of the people in their various environments can recognize that and hopefully respond in similar ways to that. And then the other thing that we really want to think about is that modeling and I alluded to that on the fourth column of that. And please use my talker when speaking to me it helps me to understand and learn. So, one of the things that I've done recently for practical AC is get a review of a, a meta analysis of the different research that's talking about aided language and there's, there's solid evidence that aided language helps so they are there. The reviewers won't say that it's an evidence based practice yet, because they're very rigid in their definition of evidence based practice, but it's certainly a promising practice and what and that there's lots of research that supports to help students to, to learn their language. And because we're doing it this way. I'm not going to show you this video today. If you haven't seen this video I know so many people have already, but if you haven't seen this video. Please shoot me an email and I'll send you the link or just look up aided language, aided language input from one kid's place. It's a, it's a nice video. There's a couple things about it that kind of make me crazy, but overall it shows a nice example of how to do this. What I want to share with you again, this is some of my own thinking so I'd be delighted to have people respond and say that makes sense or not about that. But people talk about aided language input in a whole bunch of different ways. So I've tried to put it together in an umbrella kind of a system where I'm saying aided language input is the umbrella term for these various ways that we will support aided language by responding using the system that the child is expected to be using. So, first of all, responding to all communication. So that sort of goes to that chart. So, however, the child is trying to communicate with you at the time you're going to be responsive to that and you're going to reflect back and give them words and hopefully model some symbols that reflect what your understanding of them. You might expand. Oh, I think you want water or you want, for me, you probably want wine or want coffee. So it's, that's a response to what you're seeing them do what should their behaviors. You're honoring it, you're reflecting it back, and you're showing them what you're, you're giving them the words but you're also modeling at that time. So, see, this is already dad because I'm using the word modeling in a different kind of context that I'm going to in a minute. Then the other way that you're going to use aided language is to talk with the child using their system. So that means as you're sitting and having a conversation, you would, you would speak your words, but you would also show them those words on their device. So, you wouldn't probably model or provide it is input for every word that you're saying because that might break the communication down so being so takes a long to model every single word, but some key words. And again, it depends on the child if I kind of go back to a lot of Hanan kind of stuff, or just early language development if the child is not producing any words using their system, then I would maybe model one word or maybe to if they're producing one word utterances to think about it in terms of natural language development, I might model two words. So thinking about that as you're talking to them. You don't need to also, you don't want to change if the word on the device is, let me think now, okay, we'll use that example of different. And if I'm going to say he's acting differently, I would still say differently, but I would push the or show the symbol or use the device to say different. So it doesn't have to be exactly a grammatical match all the time, but we do want to think about talking to the child using their system so they can see and learn that that other people can do this in an ideal world. You'd have two devices that the person that is talking with them would be modeling on a device and then they'd be using their own device. We don't have that very, very often or at all. And then the last thing which I intentionally called modeling even though sadly referred to modeling in the last two. So sorry about that. This is a work in progress Chloe is to model how they might say something. So and it's, it's all a little bit subtle in the difference, but there's a difference. So if the child is really angry and is on the floor and you're going, well, he's not happy. I might talk to the thing you're not happy. I'm sorry. And then I might say, I can show you. Let me show you how to say, I don't like this. I don't want to do this or I don't want it. So I would show them so you and I might use the words, you could say, you could say it you could say, I don't want to, which is sort of inviting them to follow your model. I'm going to show it to you and I'm going to invite you to say it. I would never say show me. You don't like it or I would get ahead of myself here and never put them through that because I would really be not there. All right, thought it was a slide ahead. I would really be just wanting to show them another way other than the being on the ground that they could tell me that so one is responding to them. Another one is talking with them. And the third one is actually modeling for them how they could use their system to say something. So the interest in people's comments on how I'm, as I said, a work in progress. All right, so the person scaffolding the child's development must be more competent than the child and the use of their form. So that means if you're helping a kid to learn a AC language system, you have to be more competent in that language system than they are. That doesn't mean that you have to be fluent in the language system, but you have to be at least ahead of them. And usually we have the advantage for most of the language systems of being able to read so therefore we can read and get ahead of them that way sort of as a sneaky scaffold for us. But I'll give you an example there. There was a young lady who I had been helping the team with and she had had had protocol on her on an iPad and for various reasons we decided to go low tech for a while. And I won't get into the whole story. But then we decided that there's a point that, yeah, it's time we're going to we're going to reintroduce her her iPad. We're going to put it in different cases. She doesn't recognize her iPad that plays videos. But anyway, and I said, but before you do this, both the educational system to it's fantastic and the teacher in the school that was supporting it. I said, you guys both have to know how the system works. You have to know how to speak prologos and to their credit that he took it home. I think over it was over Easter break. And did she become fluent? No, but she certainly was a more knowledgeable other. And I think that's really an important thing that we have to think about making sure that we're at least a little ahead of the students that we're working with in their language systems. I don't think I need to say anything about that communication is everywhere all the time. So we need to think about communication partners that can support it and also support it not only in the classroom, but also in all aspects of their daily lives. So social networks is a an assessment kind of. It's a guiding protocol that many people use an AC. One of the things that they talk about is thinking about who are the people that these kids are going to communicate with. And here are some circles that are circles that all of us engage in. So for my children or my person in the middle, the lifelong partners would be the family like mom and dad and siblings. And then the next piece would be close friends. So maybe they're, you know, not only the kids that they know in the class, but the kids that are really their friends that are coming over every day after school, what not. And then you have acquaintances, which would be maybe the kids in the class and other people that they just know. And then there's paid workers and for typically developing kids or kids that are developing into talkers paid workers. Don't make up that big of a piece. You know, there's a teacher who I guess is a paid worker and maybe a doctor who's a paid worker and a dentist who's a paid worker. So there's maybe more of those in their lives that unfamiliar partners, but they're not that many. And then I'm familiar partners. When we're talking about kids with complex communication needs or even just people with disabilities in general, paid workers are the most common communication partners, which is kind of bad actually. And something that we have to really, I think work hard to try and build in more communication partners who are not always paid workers. So we need to think about promoting competence and parents. And I've been big on this in the last little while about how are we helping parents to engage with us with our kids that have complex communication needs. How are we inviting parents into the conversation into the dialogue to make it safe to make it fun, perhaps, or at least to even bring them into the conversation. So I know many places are doing parent nights, which I think is critical if this is ever going to work. We need parents on on board and we need parents to understand and to be actually be here. These kinds of talks so they can really get what it is that we're trying to do and why it is we're trying to do. So parents need scaffold as well and help to learn this. So again, I'm pushing you back to a practical AAC for some really great ideas for helping training and scaffolding of parents as well as staff. So we need to think about that. The other group that we really need to put a lot of effort and energy in is terms of siblings and peers, trying to avoid giving them the mini teacher role. So how do we, I was in a, in a classroom, I don't know where the heck I was last week, I think. And it was just beautiful as a preschool classroom and they had a core board up on the wall and it was a class where there was kids with different abilities. And so some of the, the, I guess, more typically developing kids actually got some of those little hand pointers and they were starting to model and use the core vocabulary in the classroom. So there's not no one that's better than sibling or a peer. So that was a lovely example of how kids in the classroom can just jump in and they just do it naturally and they're wonderful support. So we need to try and hone that and also give them permission to do that and, and give them some support in terms of doing it. A more intentional way would be using Carolyn Musselwhite's communication circles. I know Carolyn has done a fair bit of work around the province using communication circles, and she did a webinar for us, which I don't think is posted sadly. So maybe it's time again. But if you want some information on that on communication circles, there's a few things out on the web and then Carolyn's blog spot there, which has some great suggestions. And again, if you want more about Carolyn's coming to Edmonton in May, I don't think she's doing a session here, but maybe I could convince her to go in front of a camera and do a session for us on communication circles because I think it's a critical, piece in our toolbox to bring peers in and help, and also help peers to understand how to, not only what the system is, but to not have some strategies in their back pockets for how to engage with using an AAC system. Because the research says that despite being in quote inclusive classrooms and kids that use AAC primarily and goes back to the slide that I had earlier, interacted with their support personnel and very infrequently had conversations with their peers despite being in close proximity. So was it scaffolded? Was it supported? It doesn't appear that it was enough anyway. Very few interactions were initiated by the student to use AAC, and certainly when they were initiations to their peers, it was very different than what they were when they were initiating to adults. And the students with disabilities applied more heavily on facial expressions and gestures in the use of their AAC device, which probably isn't for surprising, but maybe, again, creating that communicatively accessible environment, maybe we can build up the number of interactions as well as not getting away with that we want facial expressions and gestures as part of our multimodal system, but maybe helping me choose the devices a little bit more. All right. So, I may drink water, but I'm going to try and push through here. Selenia did get some water before we started. We need to think about, and again, going back, I've hit this already, language develops by use of language. And so we need to think about how our kids can use language productively and creatively for different purposes. So, because I am going to go drink, get a drink water, I'm going to set you to a task for about two minutes. Well, I do that. I want you to think about the last time you met someone new. And I want you to think about the answers to this question. Did you express your wants and needs? Did you make requests? I would like you to go down the street and get me a glass of water. Did you give them some directions? First, I would like you to go there and then I would like you to do that. Did you ask them questions? Did you answer questions? Did you make comments? Probably did you share information and did you share your feelings? So I'm just going to leave that up for a little bit. I want you to think about it. And I will be back in two seconds with a glass of water so that I can continue on and finish the rest of the session. Okay, so make your comments in the chat, please. Thank you. All right, I see the chat is full of questions or comments. But anyway, I'm going to go through this more slowly then. So, the last time you met someone new. Yes or no. Did you express your wants and needs? I really want a drink of water. Anybody? Yes or no. Okay, one says yes. Okay. Did you make a request? Would you please get me a drink of water? Did you make a request? Yeah, that's not usual. And usually I actually expressing wants and needs in the very first minute. Somebody I don't know. Anyway, did you give them some directions? Yeah, not unless it was a service worker. Well, great. Did you give some directions? Did you say please stand away from me or please walk down to the end of the block? Nope. Okay. Did you ask some questions? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Did you answer some questions? Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Thank you. Did you make some comments? Oh, I really like your sweater. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Did you share information? Hi, my name's Kathy. I work in the field of AC nice. Yes. Did you share feelings? Well, maybe not. I typically have done this activity when I'm in a face-to-face group and go and have somebody meet somebody new. And then we walk through these things. And so usually I've only let them do it for three or four minutes. And then this idea, did you share your feelings? Well, we probably, you know, maybe it's like, oh, it's a nice day today. I'm really happy about that. That might be the kind of feelings, but usually you don't get to sharing feelings until you're together with somebody for a little bit longer. And yet, in the research, we'll say most of the AAC research is all about expressing wants and needs and making requests. There's very little that's talking about providing kids opportunities to ask and answer questions and to make comments. So it's something that I think we have to think a lot more about. So now I'm going to give you a little bit of a quiz. Yes. Is this a myth or a fact? The primary goal of communication is to express wants and needs. You can send it privately if you want. Myth or fact? Or trick question. I'm waiting. Something in the chat. Let me know. Myth says, Real, thank you, Real. Myth says, Joel, thank you. Yep, you're exactly right. It is a myth. It's a trick. Well, River, no. Maybe a little bit of a trick. I think the point is, and this is straight out of a lovely old document from, oh goodness, BC. In most situations, with most people, expressing wants and needs is not the main thing that we're going to do. Communication is about social expression. So wants and needs seems to be something that we're very hooked on in the field of AAC because it's so tangible, I think, and because of the pecs world, perhaps. But if you could say three things, would you say, I want to go to the toilet? I'm hungry. I'm thirsty. Those are pretty bounded things. You would say that and then you'd kind of be done. Or would you say, hey, how are you? Can we talk? I maybe not. I like you. I love you. So the truth is, control of your environment isn't as important or certainly is motivating as that social interaction, which is most of what our conversations are about. So I would say expressing wants and needs is not what we really need to be focusing on. It's many more of the other kinds of things, the social interactions, the social exchanges that we need, which goes to this lovely, I don't even know who did this. Maybe more renevers. I've taken it off the web. We've used it a lot. Yes, I can request, but can I use a variety of readings? Can I ask and answer questions? At what age do kids typically start asking questions in their development? Yeah, exactly. So we've got kids and they need to be able to ask questions. Why? What? Where? Why? And we really need to put some more emphasis on that. Make a variety of comments. Kids are commenting from early, early days. We need to be requesting as part of it, but it's far from all of it. And it's far, I would argue, from the most important thing. All right, so we need to help parents and other adults. We're scaffolding the adult scaffolding the scaffolders engage in conversation. So again, I'm pushing you back to project to practical AC. She's got a lovely blog there from me, 2016, where she's taking a whole bunch of routines that we can help her. She's at school that goes beyond nearly requesting things, right? So I hope come and take a look at that. That brings into dialogue into conversation into building language rather than just requesting things. It's a pretty narrow band of language and it's kind of dead end. So I've requested it. It's over better to talk about it than to merely request it. Okay. And then also same kind of things Carol's got for us practical AC for with peers. So some resources that you can go to if you want some more ideas about that. I need to involve the child in conversations that make a difference in the situation. So this is all about choice making. So choice making is another thing that we tend to put a whole lot of emphasis on. And of course, everyone needs to make choices in their lives and they need to be engaged and be able to direct things in their lives. But let's think about the way we offer choices. Would you like an apple or an orange? Perhaps I don't like apples or oranges and I would like something else. When you're only giving a two choice situation to a child, you are really perhaps and if they're not speaking that if they're not able to speak and say, yeah, I don't want either one of those things. I want to talk about that choice really limits the their interaction and it also may give us some false information. I know this is Linda Burkhart tends to say, oh, yeah, okay, we're giving them two choices. The child doesn't look at either one of them. Well, gosh, they don't even know how to make. They need to do more about choice making because they don't even know how to make a choice. Well, how do we know that we're giving them choices that they want us that they care a hoot about. So, you know, like this. Oh, you looked at coffee. I think you want made a choice. Well, maybe. So what we need to think about is giving them engaging them in in not only that goes beyond choice making to actually talking about the choices that they've made, or also to say this that or something else. And then that opens up another another dialogue and again, we're running out of time. If you ever get a chance to see Linda Burkhart, she talks about this so much better than I'm doing today. So I'm not saying that we don't provide choices for kids, but I think a two choice situation where where they don't have the opportunity to say, you know, but neither of those things matter to me. So hoot. I don't want either one of them is very limiting and not building language and not really giving the child the sense of autonomy and agency that they will need to develop further. All right. The other important thing that I think is critical as we're helping our kids develop into competent communicators, but also. Safe individuals is we also need to teach kids how to refuse. Yes, we requesting part of it, but refusal is also another part of it. Again, very early and language development kids say no, and sometimes they can get away with saying no and sometimes we don't let them say no, but in my research, I came across or I heard stories of abuse. That I wasn't looking for it, but it was kids that had no way to say no, no, I don't like it. No, that's not right. No, you can't do that. Because they've never really been giving an opportunity or never really, I think, been taught that no is an appropriate thing to say. So we really do need to let kids have experience in saying no, what sort of goes to my next topic or a next slide when we're thinking about communication and all that involves as a social activity. Are we really teaching communication or are we teaching compliance? So when we've got kids that are talking kids, they can negotiate with us all the time. So they, and this is a great little example, we're going to leave in five minutes and the kid says, no, 10 minutes, please. And then mom says, okay, seven, then we've got to go. But if you're a child that doesn't have that ability to negotiate, because you don't have the speech to be able to negotiate, you're going to probably negotiate in ways that we don't like, as in having a meltdown or as in running away or all of those things that we've come to label behavior when in a kid that can talk because they have those skills to negotiate, they wouldn't have those challenging behaviors because language gives it to them. So it goes to the idea that we have to teach them that there's an appropriate time to say no that you can say no and you will be respected. But there's also a time when no, you know, that you can try to negotiate that and say a different way, but you will have to eventually respond. So big topic I'm talking about in a very short period of time, but it's really become very important to me that we think about this to keep our kids safe and to keep our kids from not being identified as behavior problems when really those behaviors are the only way they have to negotiate in a world where everyone is bossing them around all the time. Not said. So we need to give me my words use my words have my peers use my words and also lastly teach me my words. So this has become a big mantra of mine in the last little while. And I know that it's not very often in Alberta that speech pathologists have time to do language therapy with kids that are AC device users or even AC system users. But I really think if we're thinking about a pathway to language that we need to put greater emphasis on teaching language, either in this instance is with the teacher who's got a core board and she's traditionally teaching those kids the how to use the language, how to use the symbols, how to put them together in words, how to build language, or in in this. I'll say this in the states my friends from the states are kind of gobsmacked when I say well, our kids don't have, you know, one of the comments that is often made is what we need to think about using the language, the AC system outside of therapy time. And I'm going, yeah, well, therapy time would be a nice idea, but it's not really not happening here. Somehow or another, I think we need to recognize that if we're thinking about aided communicators on a path to language development. And if if SLPs thought more about these kids as language kids and less about them as being AC kids or that AC is a path to language, then we would think about some ways to either create language learning sessions with educational systems or teachers or find the time, especially as we're thinking about developing more competent communicators to do actual language therapy with our AC kids. And I, I know, I know there's never enough time but I think this is something that we'll all need to put our hats on to think about is how we can think about how we can treat these kids more as having delayed language and giving them more enriched language sessions. So this, this video with you, I'm not going to show it because we really are going to run out of time here pretty quickly. But it's, well, hang on, maybe I'll just for a little minute. Whoops. Sorry, I'm going to lie and I'm going to go to the video. Again, probably many of you have seen to this from the dynamic learning maps Karen Erickson. So, and there's all kinds of videos here, but I'm going to take you. We're going to say the technology prayer, please work. Oh, I had it there. I'm not sure if you're going to hear the sound of this or not. So this is an example. I'm just going to pause. Can you can somebody tell me can you hear the sound in the, in the video when I'm playing it. Okay, I will try and pump it up a little bit. And I don't quite know what to do. But anyway, let's try and see if it's too low. I will maybe just point you out this afterwards. System start by highlighting a specific word and symbol show the word and symbol to your students. Next use the word and symbol in a variety of examples and pair the new words you are teaching with. Notice that the teacher is using the printed word can rather than a symbol. She made this choice because the symbol for this word was so abstract that she decided it would be just as easy for her students to learn the printed word. And the long term benefits of using a printed word were steps toward conventional literacy. Notice also that she use I'm going to jump up a little bit ahead. Okay, so the words and symbols her students already know. I'm going to. So you can, you can see there. And if you want the link to that I can it's on the DLM I can send it to you you can watch the whole thing. What I really like about what she's doing there is she's being very intentional with her teaching. She's she's doing a really lovely language session. The other thing that I can point out that kind of an amazing classroom is she's got her core and her well organized friends. She's introducing the core vocabulary, but boom, she takes over and she brings some cringe vocabulary along with that. This is happens to be a congregated group of kids, some of whom are talker, some of whom aren't. But I think, ideally, if you could do it in with a group of kids that's always best, but even if you could have an opportunity to do some of these kinds of things in a language session with with some of the kids who are we're hoping to develop into competent aided communicators, they're going to have a whole lot more like likelihood of success than if they're only being given opportunities as well as models. We this intentional teaching will help move them along a whole lot faster. I am a profound believer in and then time I said give me time. Time is the is the devil for all of us but certainly it's a devil for kids that need to have the time to develop into augmented speakers. Probably most of you have heard this quote from Jane Corson who actually we've had a request to have her come and do some stuff with us. I'm going to try and get that to happen that. Oh, no, this isn't from Jane Corson. So kids are immersed and hear words around them for 12 18 months before we expect them to understand the chief utter a single word. Yet somehow many people know that you guys are all not those people. But I've heard this well they've had this device for six six months and they've only used said one word. Well, yeah, really, first of all, that would be an amazing thing for a talking child to be speaking by six months. The other thing is our kids can to have cognitive challenges as well. So for them to take longer to use a system is not surprising. The surprising thing is that it usually doesn't take six months for kids to start to say something using their AC systems. But if we when we put it into context for what we expect of a typically developing child we are perhaps sometimes have very, very high and unreasonable expectations for our aided communicators. So we need to give them more time. The other thing that we need to do is give them time to. After that model or after we've given them the, they responded to them, just wait and see, give them more time, give them a prompts so the prompts might be Oh, I see that you got a new toy do you like it and that's a nice verbal prompts just let them respond or not give them wait time. If they don't respond, then you might say, Oh, I'm going to show you how you might say that you like it or you don't like it. Remember, that's that modeling thing. But and then wait that it's the hardest thing for adults and for talking people to do and it's a hard thing for me to do probably is to wait so and waiting is critically important and in that waiting, we will invite them to respond to us. We won't demand that they respond to us. So this is the big thing about hand over hand and I'm going to have you all put your hand up in the virtual world and say, I will not do hand over hand with my kids anymore in any kind, but certainly not in the world of AC. I will not put kids through touching things on their device by me moving their hands because when you do that, you are actually doing it. They're not doing anything. They're just learning that eventually they'll grab my hand and put me through something. Whereas when even if you wait and let them do anything, you can respond to it or a strategy that many people are using and Karen Erickson was the first one that I heard talk about this is hop on. So you let the child grab your hand on top of it and it's kind of amazing to me when I've tried this is how well it's worked in a couple of occasions. It was just terrifyingly immediate that they just took my finger and started to put use my hand to to explore their device. But with hop on is the child is hopping on and you are intentionally still doing the movement but they know that it's you and they're hopefully watching your hand because they've engaged with you instead of you pulling their hand in and dragging them along. There's a neat little website that talks about this, and I'm going to say right now that one of the best talks I've heard for a long time about kids with multiple disabilities was done by the teachers of the visually impaired PLC last week and it's recorded and it's going to be put up on our list of webinars and she showed beautiful examples of what happens if you do hand over hand with typically developing kids and how soon they just engage and don't want to do something that they thought was fun before we put our hands all over them. So please, please no more hand over hand. Right. Coming to the end. We're going to go back a communicatively accessible environment recognizes the child's need for aided communication and provides it recognizes the child must have access to aided language in all situations with all communication partners. Still understanding what a big asset is. This is where we're going to this is sort of the gold standard things that we need to think about. And where the communication partners themselves are able to scaffold and support the child that provides strength since they're aided language development. So yes, we're helping them to be communicators. But also we're really intentionally thinking about language development to a seed to do language development. I'm not going to do the bill of rights things because I think that we're getting a lot of people sort of having to go and getting to be the end of the day. What I will spend some time doing if you are not part of the provincial community CCN professional community. And you want to be shooting an email, I will send you a link to a Google form and once you fill that out you will be on the list for evermore or hopefully forevermore at least until I have a new list that you should be on the list. I have all kinds of information for me about webinars like this one webinars like the one tomorrow afternoon from 330 to 430 with Lauren Anders who's going to talk about AC implementation I think a really important thing that we need to put some more emphasis on. So that's one way to get some more information. Here are some of the if you want to build your virtual team. And some of the places that I referred to today AC intervention. I think there's a couple of other ones AC girls blog spot practical AC. Oh my goodness, it is, it is just full of wonderful resources you can go and just about go and do any kind of resourcing that you want there and and and find or any kind of questions about AC and find great resources there Carol does a magnificent job. I'm going to put a plug in for Isaac Canada. And so if you're not a member of Isaac, you might want to consider being a member of Isaac. So, Isaac is the International Society for augmentative and alternative communication. And if you really want to do something fun and you can join me in Australia in the summer for the Isaac convention, but I know that if you want more information about that I'm happy to provide that with you too. It will be fun and exciting and it's in Australia so there you go. I've talked a lot about the archive webinars here so I'm going to click on that. Oh, hang on. Alright, look at that is probably alright so then I'm going to never mind I'll have to fix that. So here's here's how I go to find this. I go erlc.ca and then this really high tech and then I put in low incidence you can see I've done it a lot. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Oh, for goodness sakes. I'm eating up my bandwidth. Shoot. Alright, hang on. Here we go. A better way. So instead of on that slide it says erlc the actual the link the web link is a rdpc and I'll change that on the slides if anybody wants the slides as I said at the front, let me know. So it's, it's Alberta regional professional development consortium consortium. When you get there you get to a thing that takes you to low incidence resources and there are some sort of general ones at the top so Aaron Sheldon first thing that she did for us was there and another one on cancer treatment. And then when you go down you can see specific resources so resource for complex communication needs. We've got Jennifer Gantz talking about the interventions for autism and any Goldman did a whole session on communication Bill of Rights, and then we're missing one of Kelly's which is kind of too bad but we're going to try and find where that was. Some things that I did on 3D textual symbols and Vontechner there's two so there's just a joys of Allah, and there's more and more coming all the time. Aaron Sheldon will be up and Marianne Ronsky and rose that kick who are coming in May. If you want a preview of what they're going to be talking about you could take a little look at that video on parent coached augmentative interventions for young kids. When I said we need to bring parents into the game they've got a wonderful way to do that that I think actually would be relevant and important for engaging parents and engaging educational systems actually so lots of resources there for you to look at. I'm not going to have you do this. But I am going to say thank you if you want to get ahold of me here are my email addresses and I'm going to pause now to see if there are any questions from you and and I see that there. People are asking about sending the power plants out we will do that for sure. Also, this will be posted. I'm recording this. So this will be posted on the ER or the AR DPC site as well. Yeah, so I'm going to I'm going to pause any other questions or comments as we're winding up the winding up the session together today. Thank you. All right, well, seeing none. I, we covered a lot of territory today in two hours. I hope it made some sense. I hope it's got you thinking a little bit. And I would love if you want to send me an email feedback or questions if you don't want to do that today I'm just delighted to have you do that. That way, and I hope to see many of you online again tomorrow when we have Aaron with Aaron Lauren. Enders with us because she's just a dynamo you're going to love it so thank you so much for your attention this afternoon and we will be in touch right now I think everybody should go out and join enjoy our wonderful spring that finally came so yeah thank you Kate. It was, it was great I'm glad to be asked, and we will see you all again. All right, say goodbye.