 Alright, so everyone, I would like to take the opportunity to welcome you to tonight's webinar and I've seen Chris's slide deck so I know that we have a fast and furious hour ahead of us which is fantastic. Some of you may have seen Chris before when he was at in Edmonton or may have participated in the webinars that the Calgary Regional Consortia did, but regardless, I, I never get tired of hearing Chris present. I've been a fan ever since probably before that but since this book. So, and yeah, so Chris does lots of great stuff beyond the AAC implementation, but because we have such a jam packed hour, I am going to pass it along to you Chris, and you can introduce yourself and tell the rest of the story. Absolutely, alright well thank you and thank you everybody can you just type in chat everyone if you can hear me okay and. Yeah, and if you are in a room with other people like are you just here by yourself or you like with a bunch of other people I'd love to see that in the chat. And I hope that the chat yeah there we go. So, we alone I'm at home okay too bad but maybe that's nice it's okay to be alone. Other people I can hear you great sherry thank you. So, three of you there I can hear you watching alone okay at work great great I just want to test the chat and to see there what was going on there alright. So, the way I do my presentations are always in Google slides are most usually in Google slides, because if I make any mistakes I can go and fix them. So what you're looking at right now is the URL for this slide deck so some people have told me in the past during webinars or presentations that like to have a second screen up. They're following along on one screen, and then kind of flip through the slides on their own. So this is your moment. If you want to have that second screen or you want to have the URL. That's, that's what it is it's bit.ly slash AAC, ERLC 2018, or you can also just scan that QR code that should bring it right up on your phone as well so I'm going to give you a second there I'll leave that up and just explain who I am a little bit. My name is Chris Bouge and I am a speech therapist that works in Loudoun County Public Schools which is in northern Virginia. You'll see my next slide talks about how, even though I work for Loudoun that this is not affiliated with them so this is everything I say here is on my own right not really representing them, but a lot of my stories and and experiences come with working with Loudoun, and the teachers there who are just fabulous and great. I work in assistive technology so even though I'm a speech therapist I often think I'm an assistive technology person with a speech background, not the other way around but I'm a speech therapist that works in assistive technology, only because I've been doing that for like 16, um, your 1600 years I think yeah no like 16 years I've been working directly as an assistant technology person. So I think I've vamped long enough I hopefully you got the the URL by now if not we can throw it in the chat at the end as well people come in late. But there's my disclosure statement saying that you know I don't have any relative or relevance financial or non financial relationships with anything here. Like I said, work for Loudoun with this really affiliated with this for this particular presentation. I do a podcast. I'm one of the co host of a podcast called talking with tech, which is this, the talking with tech podcast. We put out weekly episodes where we have have interviews with different people just today we put out an interview with Aaron Sheldon who is who works with cortical vision impairment or knows students with cortical visual impairment and and and so we interviewed her about that and so every week there's different and I make a little money off the advertising of that podcast. Meaning sometimes we have sponsors for for episodes so I wanted to disclose that and also to let you know that I did get to write a book. Second book, this one's called the new assistive tech that just came out in May. So it's not even a year old, and it's all about redesigning your, your assistive technology program from a coaching mindset. All right, so excellent. Thanks, Kate. Thank you. Appreciate it. All right, so let's talk about today. This presentation is going to make some. Here we go. It is going to be all about AC and implementation. We're really going to focus on implementation when I think about AC service delivery. So let's think about it in these kind of four phases. First, we kind of have to consider what the student might need. Then we have to select what that student might need. And then we have to implement what the student might need. And then we reflect on all of that and and make adjustments and changes is see it there again, Laura. Quick, grab your phone. Take a picture. AC ERLC 2018. Okay. So today's focus is only going to be on the implementation part. That means I've made some presumptions, right? I've assumed that the people in this room know that these things, that when you're working with a student with a disability and you're working with AC, that someone has to believe that given given enough time and enough the right tools and the right instruction that they will eventually be able to say whatever they want to say, however they want to say that, whatever they want to say, however they want to say. I'm also making the assumption that because we already worked through the consideration and selection process that you know students that are already working with some sort of system that would give them access to robust language, meaning that someday they can use this system to say whatever they want to say. So making the assumption that you, those of you here know about the importance of motor planning and motor memory and keeping the buttons, the cells or whatever the access method is, keeping the symbols in the same spot, not changing that up for students. These are all things that I would talk about in a different webinar and we would hit these more exclusively and with more slides and talk about it in more depth. I'm making the assumption that you know these things. If you don't, let me know and we can talk about doing some more. Yeah. I'm going to talk about, I'm not going to talk much about core vocabulary I'm going to assume again that you've heard of core vocabulary and know what that is and understand the benefits of trying to teach those words. And then again, I'm going to touch on this a little bit, but the idea that the way to teach language to students the way to teach the students language using their AC device is by modeling on that device. A strategy called a language stimulation, or also called a language input or partner assisted communication or partner assisted input, but the idea is that you're modeling on the students device. Cool. If you don't like I said we'll work that out in another webinar sometime or listen to our podcast because the podcast goes through a lot of these as well. Cool. So, real quickly, these are what I call the necessary components of AC. Someone has to believe that someday they were able to say whatever they want to say using the device up to us to teach them how to do that. Expect and work towards something called spontaneous novel utterance generation. Again, being able to say whatever you want to say whenever you want to say it. Teach core vocabulary. Consider the motor plan when you're selecting the device and and and every decision you make afterwards. They're going to model using least to most prompting and I know I'm going faster because I said that these are all the presumption that I've already made that you know this. If you don't know about least to most prompting, there's going to be a slide on it later so we'll talk about that a little bit more in depth. And then, most importantly, and I'll hit this again, that this teaching kids how to use language and learn language is fun. It's not a drill and kill sort of thing that sucks the fun out of being in school or being in therapy. The idea is for kids to enjoy themselves and when they enjoy themselves and you enjoy yourself. Everyone learns better. Okay, so just to put that in there's a nice little graphic that I like to use that say here's kind of the sweet spot if you can do these three merge these three components together, you maybe have started your path towards success with with AC or vocabulary, aided language, motor access planning and memory. Alright, we are specifically going to focus on implementation. So here we go. When you're implementing a device the first thing I think you really need you've selected it, you've got a device you've put it in the students hands. I think one of the first things you need to do is measure the language of the student maybe in that comes part of part of selecting the, maybe before selecting the device is measuring the students language but you definitely have to think of where is the student in regard to their language abilities. So I like to use the analogy that language is like a staircase and we are all somewhere on the staircase. Most of us who are who speak verbally and our verbal communicators might be at the top of that staircase and that we can say whatever we want to say however we want to say it. Some AC users are at the top of that staircase where they can use their system to say whatever they want to say, but many early learners kids who are just getting communication devices. Chances are they're down on the bottom of the staircase or one or two steps up on the staircase. And so the first task is to kind of figure out where they are on that staircase like how far down at the bottom. If language development is a stair case, then which step are they on. And so what you need are some tools to help you decide where the students are so that you can measure the growth over time. Again, this could be a whole separate webinar on just measuring so I'm going to go through these quickly. I'm going to make the assumption that you've heard of Brown's grammatical morphemes. If you're a speech therapist or work with speech therapists that you know that these kind of represent a progression of language where you can measure language by moving through these morphemes. Like learning when to use ing, when to use in, when to use on, when to learn, when you use plural s and so forth. So you can use that as sort of a benchmark of where students are. Sometimes I find that some of the earliest learners are even pre Brown's 14. So we have to think of even a more discrete way of measuring language before, before this. Another way to measure language is our old friend me length of utterance. Some speech therapists I know when they see that they start to shudder because it takes them back to their grad school days. But something there's this weird phenomenon that happens sometimes when an AC device gets put in place or considered where the therapist working with that student seem to think, oh, the device is in place. I need to know some whole new set of magic, you know, and the truth is there are some certain skills. And the truth is, yes, but it doesn't mean you forget everything you know about working with language. You can lean on your knowledge of how to create mean length of utterance or how to measure the mean length of utterance for people and use that as a barometer for how a student is doing. This is a tool that maybe you've heard of mean length of utterance. Many of you've heard of Brown's grammatical morphemes, but this one might be new to you. This is called the APT. It was developed by a bunch of educators out in the state of Iowa. And what they were finding in their neck of the woods is that many of the teachers they were working with were having trouble selecting which tools they should use to help evaluate language and help select AC systems. So they created a tool themselves to help teachers select AC systems and to measure language. And so that's called the APT and there's a link right there that takes you to it that you can explore in the future. But you can see it kind of goes through what different things you'd be considering for a student that might be in these different stages, emergent pre symbolic, emergent symbolic context dependent and then an independent communicator. The DAG is put out by Toby Dynavox and that is another assessment tool. It is like a PDF. You click on that PDF and you'll see that it kind of walks you through those same similar stages of development. And so you can kind of ask you questions and then you kind of answer them, either yourself or as a team to again put students on the staircase of language development. Another tool that some of you may have heard of have you heard of it please put in the chat if you've heard of it or if you're even using it I'd love to hear your experiences with the communication matrix. It's another tool that you can use great you're using it great. Some people say that it takes a little long to actually use that be your experience as well like I'd love to hear feedback go ahead and put in the chat. Absolutely using it great people are loving it fantastic so cool sounds like you know about it and so I'm going to move on from there. One you might not know about because we developed it. We in London County Public Schools developed it is called the coal the continuum continuum of language expression. So we looked at the communication matrix and found it that for if we wanted every teacher to do it it might feel like a little daunting because it is a process to go through. And so we wanted to make kind of a simplified version. And so, and we felt like one of the things that was lacking for a lot of our teachers is they didn't really understand the early very very early that language development what that looked like. So we created a Google sheet that is a. Well, what we first we did is me and two speech therapist and a preschool teacher poured over all of this research and measurement tools and books on early language development and we created our own step by step. Kind of staircase if you will. These are all the skills that would happen earlier and then me and as a student grows you'd expect the next skill and here's a next set of skills we we put them in our own kind of what we called stages stage one stage two. And then we created a Google sheet that would allow teams to you could pull it up there and you can look at it would allow teams to come together and ask questions like, well okay does the student glance at a person or visual stimulation for one second and you could say, whether that student did that occasionally or never or usually or always, and it would eventually score if you could fill this out until until you kept me getting a bunch of zeros and you felt like you didn't need to go on any further. And it would give you a score that you could measure and that would give you something that you could then use a year again a year later a year post intervention and say let's go through this this call again and see where the student has made gains, and you could see kind of a number grow if you will. So check it out. You say it's not, you know, it's meant to be just a informal tool that you can use to assess language. If we had more time if this was like a full day presentation and I was there with you. We might spend some time where I'd ask you to take a student and actually pick one of these tools to go through and experiment on just to get a feel for what the tools are like but I'm going to ask you to do that on your own time. Because after you've measured language, you feel like you know what step it's the students on now you got to teach language. So, when you're teaching language, just like in any other teaching language and using for AC is no different you start with goals. I don't have a lot of slides here and goals I'm going to make the assumption that you know how to use goals. But when you're coming when you're thinking of AC. Try and keep the goals. There's lots of different ways you can write goals but kind of a rule of thumb is to keep the pragmatics in mind. So you might because that's really the purpose behind communication is the reasons why you communicate and so if that's the reason you should you communicate then that might be a good goal is to is to say I want a student to reject I want a student to know how to ask. I want a student to know how to make a command. Those are good, good ways to think about goals. We do a whole talking with tech episode on how to write effective goals and IEPs. So, go check that out as well. The reason I bring this up and I put this little meme in here is like, there's this little girl that says, should we teach language or should we practice AC and she's like, Well, why don't we do both and everyone cheers right. Some people seem to think that these are two separate things. There's teaching AC and teaching language and there's certainly operational part of it is like turning on a device and and making sure it's charged and and knowing how to program. There's a there's there is a component that is specific to teaching AC, but all the rest of it is just language it's just teaching language and so you're going to see that there's a lot of overlap here that is just regular language therapy. When you're thinking about implementing a device and you're doing your teaching language or teaching words and what words mean you do all of these activities and just out of curious. You see I have here, you know you're going to read stories you do crafts you're going to play games music. There's interactive lessons then you're going to have interactions with the student just out of curious here which one of you think which which do you think on this particular slide is maybe the most important, you know. Do you think maybe reading stories is the most important or maybe crafts is most important. I'm curious is my own little informal assessment that I'm doing here what you all think might be the most important. There is no right or wrong answer. Interactive lessons maybe interactions interactions interactions interactions yeah stories yeah you know I think maybe one reason tell me tell me if I'm wrong here some people are saying stories is because often. Again, with AC, we find that there's a lack of literacy instruction right that they're a student. I get to go into plenty of boxes and classrooms in their is you go and you sit and you do file folder games for a few minutes then you come over and have a break and then you do a different set of file folder games. And then you take a break and then you come over and have a little gross motor activity and then you take a break and the whole time you're thinking where's the literacy where is the teaching of the words where is the. And is that a small microcosm of the day which shouldn't be a much more rich environment. The reason I think a lot of people were saying interactions is because, again, same thing, go and do a file folder game. It's not really all that interactive, you know, even if someone's sitting with you it's kind of like. Alright, let's open it can be open the file folder game rip this piece of paper off and put it on this side and rip the next piece off and put it on this side whatever the game might be. And what I found over the years is that if you're having fun with the students if you're engaging and have positive interactions if it is enjoyable for you. I mean no one really wants to go and do file folder games like no one jumps out of bed in the morning. I can't wait to do my power folder games today. Maybe some do but I don't see it that often in the in the classrooms that I work with. And so it's these having these rich interactions that might be the most possibly might be one of the most important parts of the whole therapy process is is just interacting in a natural way with students that it's fun. So, all of that boils down to designing awesome educational experiences you are the ones in charge of designing what that student goes into I often hear this is with when working with kids with a AC, he's just not motivated to use it. Nothing is just this case is not motivated by anything. It's like, well, I don't know if that's the case. It maybe it's just that you haven't found a way to motivate him because coming into the classroom. And ask him when do these boring activities is not motivating for anyone, you know. And when you reframe that and you think what could you do to make it more motivating the whole class more exciting the whole the experiences that they're in be more engaging. Teachers seem to switch and they go Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, what can I do right. Yeah, it's about manipulating the environment exactly brainworks. Awesome. You're in charge of it to I think that often people forget that right, we get to be there as a choice. And this kids are often not there by choice right, they would just assume not be in that room with you. So how can we, they would rather be maybe, you know, back home and they're being back chair watching TV or watching YouTube right, and then we give them that as a reward when they run over to take a break. But how can we make what we're doing just so much more enticing it so that we're so engaging that they want to be there. I'm going to come off my soapbox and give you some some strategies. I think of the design process like this when you're trying to teach language. First, you start with a word. There's a whole philosophy out there about teaching one word at a time you're going to see some slides out here in the future. And yeah, I agree with that teach one word at a time. Sometimes though I think it makes sense to teach two words at a time meeting. Let's see how let's see if I'm going to teach go. What should I teach is along with that everybody in chat. I'm going to teach go I might as well teach. Yeah, yeah, if I'm going to teach in and I might as well teach right right out out out if I'm going to teach put. Oh wait, everyone is text aren't coming in as fast right because put put take in on right those. Some people might say away right so sometimes words have these natural pairs and it doesn't make sense just to teach one word you want to teach to. Other times they don't have a natural pair like put and so you'd want to focus on maybe that word. And then I also say the word that you see the phrase their language unit, because sometimes I think, depending on where a kid is on that, that their staircase, they're high end up on the staircase. Maybe you don't teach a one word or two word approach anymore. Maybe you're looking at teaching clusters of words groups of words or language units. I mean by language units. I mean those morphines you know, imagine whole lessons around ing ed plural s right, not just focusing on one word, but a group of parts of words, or imagining lessons, all on temporal concepts or lessons all about position prepositions, you know, where you can group these words together and so I call those language units for lack of a better, better term to call them. Step two there I think is optional. You assess what a student knows about a word I think you can make an assumption, even if you think a student might know a word it doesn't hurt to kind of teach it and reintroduce it. Then explicitly plan lessons that tie to the curriculum to teach those words think of the opportunities you can provide to teach the words that you're targeting. Then you do that modeling so you sit with a student and you model the word without an expectation that they do anything at first just that your model you see me modeling or my fictitious device here. But you model, and then you give them an opportunity to to try it on the device so that you're modeling first and then you kind of wait expectantly and see if they will do it if they don't, then you might prompt them a little bit by saying, I'm just trying to get the gesturing towards the device. And if they still don't do it then you might say, you turn your turn or try it, you know, and if they still don't do it then you might say, right here push this button, right push this one. And that is a way of moving towards from least to most problem. Then giving some sort of strategies to generalize what you've been practicing in the classroom at home, giving some sort of feedback to the parents to say okay listen, we practiced in and out today. Tonight, when you're at home, have the student because they've been practicing it all day long, we've seen me do it, have the students say in and out to you while you're loading the dishwasher, you know, you got all the dirty dishes in, you put the fork in, in, you put the fork in. Having the student give you commands as an example. The idea being that you're trying to generalize this outside of the specific classroom environment. Collect data, of course that's not really step six you're doing that all along, and then repeat that process with you words and new language. How does that all sound is that what you're doing now is that sort of a structure that you could use to teach other people of how to teach words to you. What you're feeling about this process I'd love to hear it in the chat as I, as I move on. It's really cool. Do we know how to be an elephant with a fork. Do we know this, one bite at a time Laura, that's right one bite at a time right. And so that's the first idea here and that's kind of the step one and that seven step process is to choose one or two words and so here are a bunch of early words that you might be working on. At a time, I want to be clear and say that that does not mean until mastery, right, we don't just sit on a drink until the kids get to drink. Instead, you do eat and drink for a week, and then you go on awesome awesome Tracy, and then you move on, and you do, let's say, a more and help or big and or or in and out and you do that the next week. And I say at a time instead of once a week because you're up in Canada, you know, you get snow right we get snow where we are to and so and people get sick you have you guys get colds in Canada. I bet you do. You know people get sick and so no you don't. The idea is, sometimes as a teacher you just as a discretion, you give teachers discretion, you know that you just did not hit and drink like you thought you should have this week, you know, maybe the assistants were sick, maybe the students were sick, maybe they came in and they were sleeping and, and just know you didn't give it your all this we had snow days. So, you might go on for two weeks, you know, here in the states just last week, we had, you know, American Thanksgiving so we had three, some of us had two or three days off last week. Maybe that's not a full week of instruction to hit these words we're going to extend it into next week that kind of stuff. So, that's what I mean by one or two words for vocabulary concepts at a time. Any of you working in the preschool environment. This is not necessarily specific to preschool but okay Julia perfect anyone else. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Alright so often when I see in preschool and you tell me if this is consistent in your environments here. And really, a lot of other environments as well but it's specifically preschool is that the way they design their curriculum is often based on a concept or a theme you know, we're going to do apples this week or insects this week is that actually, this is our insect unit, this is our, our fruits and vegetables unit, this is our camping unit, you know, that kind of how you do it for for a week. And so, and then as a second thought they think okay well we're teaching insects, or we're teaching apples, how can we mesh this the teaching of insects with the language we want to use. And so what a language based curriculum does a language based approaches. You know what we're going to do is we're going to, instead of thinking of the theme first of insects or, or apples, we're going to say we're going to teach prepositions we're going to teach in and out. Now, what would be a good way to teach in and out. Oh, I know, how about insects and apples right we can have insects go into the apple and eat the apple and we can have them, then they come out of the apple right and apples go in your mouth and then. And so the idea is that you're thinking of a word first or language concept first, and then you're building that in your building lessons around it which doesn't mean you have to change the way of the activities you're still doing kind of the same activities you know, you're still putting apples on a tree, but then you're but instead of putting apples on a tree, or here's a better example, rather than apples on a tree. Every morning you might still be doing your who's at school and who's not at school activity and you're dragging kids over, you know, we're taking a picture from one side to the next, where one side of the, the board or the screen is kids at their school and others as a side or the picture of kids in school and so you're dragging them from side to side, and you're putting them in, putting them in, putting them in they're coming out of their house and they're going into school out of their house in the school, same activity but you have thought okay, I'm putting language first in and out what would be a good way of teaching in and out. Oh, I know I can teach in and out. I could do that with our calendar activity of who's here every day. In a sense, I just want teachers thinking when they're planning, not about what theme they're doing, but what language they want to teach and then build the theme around that. Another way to plan all week long, this is adapted from a friend of mine in Idaho named Eric anger. He talks about planning all week long so that Monday is when you're introducing new words to students. So we call this model Monday you might know that you have to do much more modeling on Monday than on let's say Friday because and again maybe you have to model all along right it's never stops. But the idea is is that you especially don't have an expectation that a student is going to know a new word because you're giving them new words on Monday. Literacy Tuesday, how do we build in this word with reading and writing activities. Wednesday is doing something odd off the wall with these words. Thursday is building in some sort of math or science activity, and then Friday could be like, okay, we're going to use fringe vocabulary what fringe vocabulary goes along with the core vocabulary been teaching on these, these other days of the week, you know, not to say you'd only do any of these on any one day, but it just gives you a way to structure your week so that everybody knows oh it's Thursday we're going to do a lot of math today everyone knows it's Tuesday we're going to be doing a lot of reading and writing. When I say everyone I mean the administrators the teaching assistants, the parents the homework comes home that night has activities centered around these concepts. Another approach is to plan the language activity. Another approach is to practice language to plan the language opportunities all day long, where you try and target at least 100 opportunities to to expose that student to that word or words or language unit. And some people would say you can even get to 200. So, yes, well, so are you are you asking the question what what about total inclusion what about students who learn in general, general like classrooms, absolutely right. If I'm talking yes and those particular slides back here. I'm talking about self contained. Yes, but in here. The concepts are the same. You, you, let's see if this answers your question. So, whatever the students schedule is all day long. Right. The second to absorb this mean. Whatever the schedule is all day long whether in their self contained whether partial inclusion maybe they're completely included right. You take the students schedule here right so morning circle then there's science activity a literacy activity a snack time art math. So, you create a table like this where you list out the students schedule. The first column is how long those those each of those blocks of time can be in those blocks of time could be as discrete as five minutes, maybe it doesn't. In this example I've broken it down to 30 minute blocks but it could be like, what are we doing to teach the target word from when the student gets off the bus and then moves from the bus to hang up his backpack in the school. And then from hanging up his backpack to the time he sits down and does his morning work. How are we going to have what when can we build in the, the, the language opportunity to teach whatever the word is and again expose them to that word whatever that word is. So, in this example that you're seeing here, I've chosen the word put right. So, what I'm going to see during morning circle, what I want the teacher to do is take a blank version of this and fill it out. Okay during morning circle, we have attendance. How are we going to practice put well we're going to put others. And I think I can ask the students are or the students can tell me where to put others. Again from home to school, I can probably do that five times. And then we're doing the calendar and we're doing the weather that's all I'm just dragging the days over someone's dragging the, you know, the number of the day over. And so they're putting it from here to there that's another five exposures. And then at weather time, when we have our little bear up in our weather and next to our, our interactive whiteboard or, or wherever. All right, we're going to go look out the window. Okay, what does he need to put on. Oh, he's putting on his hat he's putting on his coach, you know those sorts of things. And you plan that way to teach the word put during morning circle and then if it happens after morning circle. Well, now it's science time we're all going over to our, our desks and we're going to have these little plants on our desk or whatever you're coming to our group table. And where we're going to all rotate from station to station and when you're here we're going to be putting plants. We're going to be planting plants and the idea is whatever the activities are you're planning all day long to be thinking about that word put and how you can expose the student to the word put with a little number after me after it. So you can tally those up and say yes we expose this student to the word put we've given them an opportunity to say the word put that you know on their device. This number of times. And right here on this particular slide down at the bottom again if we were there all day we would, we would try and start planning planning some of these out. So here's a template that you can you can use. It's a Google template that you can use you give the teachers and they can start filling out together if you want to want to try that you like that idea. A little word of warning there for those that you said I like this the idea of planning all day long. Some teachers that have tried to do it with. I started here and it's a learned lesson of my own is that they've had to pull back and say okay I can't. I'm struggling to implement put all day long Chris can I do us do can I do it for this 30 block, and then this 30 block this week. And then next week, can I try and do another 30 block and do whatever the next words are and try and learn how to implement a AC, not all day long. It feels too overwhelming, but in these smaller intervals working my way towards all day long. And I, I've seen that is that is something that they many teachers need they can't just jump into doing it all day long. So I've, I've rolled back my immediate expectations and I give them the choice well here's the here's the planning guide so if you are going home want to try and plan all day long go for it but if not, then, then you can then take your time with it. So, and then here's some examples of communication bridges again how to generalize at home giving teachers giving parents strategies for how to implement them at home. Super exciting. When we see device used outside the classroom. Yes, we know we've got carry on. One of the primary principle ways to implement communication device. I think one of the major pitfalls I see a lot of teachers do immediately when they get an AC device. Immediately they want the students to start start using the device and if they don't start using the device and there must be something wrong with the device. Or again, kids not just kids just not motivated to use their device. What they fail to done, and what they have failed to do is this particular strategy, which is called descriptive teaching. So, so descriptive teaching is the idea that when I first introduced a device for the student, I will just sit down with a device, and then I will just describe what I'm doing. I'm just going to narrate my own life. I sit, or maybe just sit. I do, and I pick up the crayon and starts coloring. Ooh, I like it, you know, and then I might say my turn and I'm just showing the student without any expectation that they even do anything that I'm using the device. Then, after I've done that for a little while, meaning right there in that session, like, maybe I'll do that for four to five minutes. Then I'll introduce it to the student and do that least the most prompting that I was talking about where I'm teasing them with the idea that, or not teasing, tempting, tempting them, not teasing them. Like, here it is, I'm going to take it away and tempting them to use the device so that they can then start saying, well, okay, I just saw you use it. Let me try and say. Like, if I have a practice crayons, I might say open, and then close up the crayons and go to reach for the crayons and be like, here's a, I showed you open, you want to, you want to do it? You know, and maybe the student will say open, if not, I might have to model it again. But my, the point is, I am using, I'm just narrating my, my, who, and I'm showing the students how to use the words that I'm targeting. Here's an example of that prompt hierarchy that I was talking about that least the most prompting. So I'm, I've mentioned it now twice is how I would do that. But this is like a little cheat sheet that I like to give to the teachers because it's a skill you need to learn. It doesn't come natural. So you got to take a moment to, to kind of practice it and kind of work through how to do this prompting so you can get better and better at it. And I find they print this cheat sheet off and they keep it as like a little index card or they even they post it up on the wall. When they do a little practice sessions around it, they get to learn that least the most prompting are people using least the most prompting now do they see teachers using it or do you see a lot of like just prompting all over the place like grabbing kids hands and making them do it or going you do it or Do you see it all over the place. I'm curious what your experiences have been in your neck of the woods. It varies. Yeah, that's what I've seen too. Another strategy for teaching the words and again this is for the students but it's also to help I think the educators wrap their brains around how to teach words because again, you see kids getting a C devices and the teaching language kind of jumps out of people's heads because they think they get so intimidated by the device sometimes. But what we're looking at here is something called the frayer model and it's a way of teaching vocabulary to any kids right. The idea is you put the word in the center and then you use this little graphic organizer to teach what the word means you know you have a definition. You have some sort of drawing you give some synonyms or examples of how to use the word and then you give an opposite. So, if you're going to teach the core vocabulary word of go. Well, what does go mean we'll put the definition there so everyone can think about right it's about moving leaving. Here's some pictures that go along with it or maybe it's the symbols that are on the students communication device here examples of how to use it and then here's the opposite. Maybe at the early preschool level I wouldn't be doing this, but for students that again maybe in the general ed classroom that you're talking about this might be a great way to at least get teachers thinking about how to think about core vocabulary. Yeah, right how many other kids with this help exactly exactly. When we're teaching words, the way to teach a word is not an isolation, but in relation to what it means with all the other words that go around it. So, how do you use it in context. So, you describe what what what's the purpose of using this word. You describe words that are similar and different that's kind of what that for your model is getting at is that it forces you to think about what those similarities and differences are. What are the meanings of the words and then and then to think about what category how categories would you put this word in. All right everybody take a look at this picture. This is a picture of a teacher that is starting to use core vocabulary in their in their in their classroom. They have got the idea that they're going to post the core vocabulary word up on the wall so that they can see it and that everyone who comes in their room knows this is the word we're working on we're working on the word in here right, which I think is an awesome thing that I think everyone should do I think it's great. For a lot of other students we put the learning objectives on the wall why wouldn't we put the core word of the week or core words of the week on the wall. I do have one little issue with this picture though does anyone have a guess what the issue is with what I would do differently I should say anyone taking a look at that picture. You might see. Yeah, exactly Lauren Laura sorry. Yes. Well yes, maybe you can put the symbol up there as well, or the icon sequence if you're using the system that uses those. But yes, what I was getting at here is that look at those sight words. Those are core vocabulary words to you don't need to have two separate words, the core word of the week could be the site words of the week and the site words that we could be the core words of the week, it could just be words of the week, because early site words mesh lists of early site words mesh with lists of core vocabulary very nicely there's a huge overlap there. So I don't think you necessarily need to separate them out big kudos to the teacher for most thing on the on the wall. Another strategy that works really well for a lot of teachers is the idea that they make a little navigation cheat sheets for themselves what you're looking at here. It's hard to tell the scale in this picture you need me in the foreground This is a giant poster on the wall and teachers have placed little sticky notes on the words to know where the second hit is on this particular device this is lamp words for life. And so here, you can see, these are all words that they use frequently or like happy birthday and holidays and vacation, and where do you find those words. Well, the first hit is under make. And so it's a little cheat sheet for how to find these common words. And together the classroom teachers are using it together, you know, they're, they're helping these little reminders. It's isn't really meant for the student it's meant as a, as a, as a strategy for the communication partners. Which you'll see is kind of a theme of this presentation. Another strategy that we like to use is something called core core vocabulary kits or core language kits. And so this idea is picture shoebox tasks, or like those file folder games that I was mentioning earlier but picture shoebox tasks. So you picture a wall with all bunch of shoeboxes on them, and on each shoebox is a word. This word is go and another shoebox it's stop and another shoebox is in another shoebox is out, or in some cases you might combine those where it's a go stop box and in out box, either way works. Someone could just go over grab the box off the shelf open up and you have instant activity to work on go and stop, because in that box is a little cheat sheet that explains what to do, and then there's a bunch of toys in there that have to do with go and stop, so that you could be explicitly teaching go and stop using these tools. And that is an idea by my friend and colleague Judy, Judy schoon over there. So the idea of having scripted areas. So again that cheat sheet that would be in one of those boxes as an example of that. You have a teaching assistant that's just learning how to do this or a sub right. Do we have some all gets a good point DJ. Let me see if I can find those and add them to the, add them to the, to the slide deck here link to them because I didn't think to include them but I'll see if I can add them in. I don't have them off the top of my head. But then the same scripts that we have these little cheat sheets. Can we put them up on the wall in the certain play areas or in the certain center areas so that again, here's a script that you might say when you're playing with blocks or you're playing with bubbles or when you're playing in the, in the kitchen area or whatever. I mentioned playing games earlier. Gaming is so motivating for kids. It's so much fun to play and it's so much core vocabulary can be introduced in games. And I like the idea of not just playing commercial games, but also making your own games. Again, there's a file folder game that we made right. The idea being, it's not just a file folder game that you're going to pull out into activity that you do, we're making one that we're making one together a little game. Another huge strategy for implementing communication devices is video modeling. So these teachers are teachers in Indiana that have made, they went looking for core vocabulary videos. Excellent, excellent DJ. Yes, which accessible accessible games is another great strategy. These teachers said we went to we went looking for core vocabulary videos and we couldn't find any on YouTube. And so that's we said we've got to make some. And so they started making videos like you can see this one here is an up and down, right? And it's just a two minute video that they can show their students. And it's just all these things going up and down like someone waking up or balls going up and down or them going up and downstairs or going up and down escalators things like that. And they often get their own kids to star in these videos so that it's even more motivating. I think there's a lot of research that goes behind video modeling. And so this is a great way. I would challenge you one to go watch their videos, but then also create your own videos of students learning the core vocabulary words and showing what core vocabulary words mean. Another strategy use anyone use predictable chart writing or predictive chart writing. This again is a week long strategy with the idea that we want to embed literacy into the context of what we're teaching. And so the idea is, you would sit with the students and you'd have a chart behind you that could be an old paper based chart, you know, like a flip chart that you have, or it could be a on your interactive whiteboard. And you do some sort of a sentence completion activity like I see a pumpkin in the room, I see a ghost in the room, I see a witch in the room all for Halloween, right? Or, and you just fill these out and you asked each student to say what do you see what do you see what do you see and you write it explicitly I see a ghost I see a witch when you're putting this explicitly on the chart behind you that's day one. Day two, you interact with the chart in some way and we review it, you know, maybe you're highlighting all the words to start with S, like C and C and C, right. And then on day three, you come back during this literacy activity, and you're going to take that chart and you're going to cut it up. Maybe the occupational therapists, right, OTs, but everyone, let's just say the OTs can love this and maybe coach people on how to do it. But you cut up the chart and you make the individual words oh well you cut out the word see you cut out the word I right. And then, after you cut it up the next day, you give those charts those those words to kids, and they become the word where they have to put them in order in a sentence like well you have the word I come over here and you have the word see you go next, and you have the word which I see which right you got it all together right now next kids let's put them in order let's move around. Let's put the sentences together if you can. And then the last day, the fifth day of the week Friday usually is that you take those words and you put them into a book. There's slides here in the future on Tarheel reader, and what's called the photo album feature of PowerPoint that are easy ways to make books that with these words that we've been using all week long. So these are again reinforcing the word see five you know in explicit explicit activities all day long or all week long. And then when you have that book, you send it home with the parents and they can read it as a great homework assignment. Here's what I did at school, you know, all week long we practice the word see, and now I'm going to read this book with my mom is going to read this book with me. Cool. Anyone using this and having good results I'd love to hear your pigtail app great great. I'd love to hear your if you're using that and what your feedback is. Now, this strategy sabotage is one of my absolute favorites it's one of the reasons I got into being a speech therapist in the first place it's one of the things I miss most about being a speech therapist on a day to day basis. The idea that you get to mess with kids right. The idea here was sabotage is that you are tempting the kids to say something by being the crazy Uncle Chris that gets to come in there right. You get to come in and you get to block the doorway when they want to leave to you get to close the the eat the goldfish cracker and then close it real quick or they get to put things in the box and then you close it real quick and they have to ask you to open it all sorts of just you come in with with all the chairs are gone. Well, how do they sit down when they have to ask for the chairs and there's so many other ways to kind of mess with kids with their routine. Again, I use that with a little grain of salt because I'm the speech therapist or consultant coming in and I don't want to set off any behaviors you throwing off a routine can could trigger behavior but mostly it's an awesome teaching strategy where you're modeling what to say for a student in these situations and then they get to learn what the words are and it's fun it's it's fun for them and it's fun for us because it's something weird and different that doesn't happen. It breaks the routine and what typically supposed to happen. That's what sabotage is that's what communication temptations are. Speaking all that let me ask you all this to any of you have your own kids. Any of your parents out there. Yes. Yes great and grandma fantastic okay so let me ask you this when you pick up your kids from school and they come after school. And you have that conversation with them maybe a dinner time or whatever you say hey what did you do at school today. What do they what do they say. Hey how was school would you do at school today. Nothing nothing nothing right and the reason that's reason they all say that is because it's true. Nothing interesting happened to them. Nothing out of the ordinary happened and that made it worthwhile to talk about right it's the same old day just like every other day. When I took notes my science teacher brought me to death. Oh but wait a second. My science teacher came in and he tripped over a pencil and fell and scraped his knee and his blood everywhere and he had to go to the emergency room and suddenly now there's something to talk about right something something out of the ordinary happened right. The idea here is kids we don't talk about the mundane. Hi honey how was your day it was fine how was yours you know we do that as adults, but if something memorable something mentionable happens, then we talk about it all day. Oh my gosh a giant shark jumped out of the ocean was chasing my son oh my gosh. Now you've got something to talk about. That's what we talk about at dinner parties that's we talk about with our friends. We talk about the stuff that's different that's out of the ordinary. We talk about the job as instructors going back to the beginning of this of this webinar talking about designing awesome instruction is that we get to design the weird, the different, the, the, the strange the, the, the novel, you know, we get to create those environments that allow students to talk about those. So, be thinking of that when you're designing your experiences, what can I give them to talk about what would be different today. What would they do if they came in and I was wearing this giant pink wig, you know, what if I came in today and it was paint all over my face what would they do what would they say, you know, how we teach them they didn't say anything to say, you know, what is that, you know, and then look at your face all weird because you have a giant pink streak of paint on it. You know, I like dressing up in costumes I think it's super fun. Yes, you keep plugging inclusion and I should keep doing that too you're so right right. This is a great way for there's always something new and strange and different happening in a classroom that's hustling and bustling that's well that's designed from a universal design framework as well. But there's flexibility and not everyone's doing the same thing. There's so much more to talk about right. So, bringing it back home, have fun, make it fun make the experiences have be fun, make it awesome for the kids. I'm not ending on that note I have a few other things to share here in the last seven minutes of our time together. This, this QR code and this URL links to a padlet padlet is just a website with a giant sticky, you can put sticky notes digital sticky notes, and what I'd love for us to build together is a an idea place where you could go and look at this giant padlet board and see all these implementation ideas of awesome, awesome ideas of how to implement language, how to teach language all day long how to implement right. And so I'm vamping here for a second for you to copy that down but if you have the original URL you have this and I'd encourage you to come back and add some, some cool activities that stuff your lessons that just, you know, you knocked it out of the park and you saw students really become engaged and have breakthrough moments. I would love to see you share just a sentence or two about what those were in some live presentations I've asked people to do that and I put them in these here. Well, you can see these are some fun ways that people have all sorts of different ways where people have made learning language exciting and fun. You can look through these slides at your own leisure where there's different fun activities. Yes, can you commit to filling out Chris's padlet. Yes, thank you. Thank you. Please try to do that. I think it'd be awesome. I'd love to see what you just one idea if you put it there just imagine if every person working on AC, but one idea on this padlet, we would have tons of we wouldn't have to think for ourselves we can just go there and pick something off the list to try you know. So as a summary statement for implementation. Like to say, have a long term vision for for language right. You start with those goals and measuring language. As often as possible the words across as many environments and that I think the phrase that we use a lot is that you might hear in AC circles is repetition with variation right. So you repeat the words over and over again but use them in different contexts and use them in different ways they get a lot of exposure to those words. Without the expectation that the student uses it and then work as a team. I think I've tried to give that as an example. You're constantly feeding the team. The parents with ideas of what to use when they go back home. One simple strategy at night. Do this with your kid because sometimes that can be overwhelming to try and model all night long. If you did this one thing tonight, you're winning. I'm going to make a bunch of slides here. I'm not going to actually cover I'm going to zoom past them because they're sort of self explanatory. They're all about creating and adapting your own materials. There are different tools here to make materials. So for instance these are just examples of adapted books where we've put some symbols on them we simulated the text right. I'd like to point out that you simulate text, not for the user necessarily but mostly for the communication partner right, adding text like this to the bottom of the screen. If you can see here on the bottom of the page makes it much more visually distracting than then and then just leaving the text by itself. So this is really meant to be a cue for the communication partner when they're modeling for the student where's the word see where's the word swimsuit how do I find it. Well this is a cheat sheet for them. DJ do I know the impact model. Yes I do there's actually a slide coming up on it here in a little bit. Of course we only have three minutes left but I knew I wouldn't get to all the slides that are in this presentation. But I'll show them to you here just in the last minute I'll show you where you can find all that cool. Yes, exactly it's a cheat sheet it makes sense but you don't do it for students. So these are other tools that you can use like I said there's a photo album feature and PowerPoint that makes it real easy to make books and make adapted books. Google also has a similar feature and add on that you can have makes it easier to make slideshows that you can add pictures in so you have to wrestle with sizing the pictures and all that. And then the unity or lamp software min speak the new voice software has the ability to make symbolize symbolize text that way and that's all free you can download install that. And my last comment about making materials is that is that I really like the idea of that in many schools we're using a project based learning approach where where kids are asked to solve problems. How do you tie that into the curriculum. Well, those problems can be great earth shattering problems like global global warming or climate change or saving the bees because bees are dying. They can be those sort of, you know, cleaning up our oceans they can be those sorts of things. They can also be very small community things like in your own school. Imagine grabbing a bunch of other students and saying, listen, these kids need to learn about the same concept you're learning about so as your project which could you consider making adapted material that teaches the concept that you just learned about let's say it's photosynthesis and teaching someone else about photosynthesis in these materials and and kids will. God they will they will come all over the they'll be like yes let me totally want to do this. I want to help their friends and their peers make materials. So, here in the last minute I just want to share this. The theme and if we had another 30 minutes I would go into it is that so often when we're teaching is it from we my job is as a communication coach right and as a speech therapist that comes into the room. You're often you're you're tasked with the idea of coaching someone else right was actually implementing the device. And that's where a lot of the research shows is that in order to be really good at implementing AC. You have to follow kind of a series of steps to get better at a specific skill that's that impact model that was mentioned earlier right the DJ I think mentioned earlier. And so these handful of slides and let you go through on your own. Talk about how to coach communication partners become better at AC, not directly tied to implementation. That's what really this presentation was about was implementation strategies, which I think I hope I gave you a bunch of but it's all the implementation is only going to work if you're a communication partner is working with them know what to do. And so here is that slide I talked about with the impact model. There's this breaks it down step by step what the impact model is gives you some specific strategies to to use to teach the impact model and to teach using communication devices. And that strategy is you use when you're doing storybook reading, and there's even more, but I'm out of time. These analogies here. Sorry, these analogies acronyms s'mores and master pals are two other strategies you can look into. Sorry Kathy I'm out of time. You're fabulous. You're fabulous. You know what, Chris leave him wanting more so there's a couple of things that I have taken from this is we need to bring you up. So you and I need to talk about that right we talked about that once before I mean we had to. So we will do that. I'm sure that we. Yeah, this is great. No kidding. Absolutely. There's some follow up that you've suggested to me that we need to do. And then I just want to give a shout or talk about the fact that in January, our webinar is all about coaching. Oh my goodness Wendy can you chime in help me remember her name. Okay, someone is going to. Oh, I've got a brain burst. So we're going to follow that up. But Chris, this was fabulous, as always. So thank you. Thank you for the active participation everybody. I really yeah people were really really engaged I'm really which because you're an engaging presenter. And we will make sure that just for everyone knows we'll make sure that the recording gets up, as well as make sure that people get the access to your slides, either from the ELC or if you have a challenge of there you go, or if you want to everyone knows that they can email me, and I can push it out that way as well so. Thank you very much. It was fabulous, and you and I will talk about when you and your family want to come up and see the mountains. Thank you so much everybody I'm looking forward to it Kathy, and I'll see you at atia. I will indeed looking forward to that too okay goodbye everyone thank you for your marvelous participation, and we'll see you in the new year. Okay, good night. Bye. Bye.