 Anyway, so hello, my name is P. Howery, not R. McConnell as it actually is there. And it is my great pleasure to welcome Lauren Enders to our monthly webinar session today. Lauren is an SLP who works in the States and has done. Many of you will see some of the things that she's done in terms of guides and little cheat sheets that we've shared before. Lauren has a wealth of experience and knowledge in AAC. And in particular, I think in actually making things happen with kids and in the classroom. So I'm delighted to have her share with us, her strategy team buy-in. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Lauren. I could say more, but I want to give you all the time that I possibly can. Yeah, I think we're going to need it. Yeah, all right. So take it away, my friend. Okay, so welcome everyone. Thank you so much for attending. And today we're going to talk about some strategies for supporting AAC team buy-in and implementation. And I know, I hope that you understand that I'm coming to you as someone who is currently and has for a long time, I don't want to say how long, worked in the schools. And that's probably all of the challenges that you see I have seen and I continue to see in certain locations and certain schools, you know, each place is different. So, but I am going to talk about some things that I have found to be really successful and hope those are helpful to you. I will try to keep an eye on the chat window and see if there's any burning questions that come along while I'm speaking, although I'm going to try to cram quite a bit of information into one hour. So it is possible that towards the end I might go kind of fast. But what I do want you to know is that anything that you put in the chat, hopefully maybe Kathy will have the ability to send that to me. And if there are things that I can answer after the fact and putting them into the handout, we'll do that. And what I'm going to do is following the presentation within a couple of days, I'm going to have a handout where I send that to Kathy and then she's going to be able to post that along with the archived link to the webinar. So you've heard a little bit about me. I am a full-time augmentative communication consultant in the schools. I'm in a county school system where a regional service agency supporting lots of school districts. It's a very big county. I've been doing that since about 2008 full-time. But my background is clearly that I'm a speech-length pathologist. So let's get going. All right, so I've worked full-time at the Bucks County Intermediate Unit in Bucks County, PA, Pennsylvania. And it seems to be that my claim to fame is that I am very, very noisy on social media. I am someone who just absolutely loves sharing resources and do so. I don't know if I should use the words obsessively, but perhaps that's appropriate. I'm on Pinterest. I have kind of a quick one of a following on Pinterest. Lots and lots of information there, which can be a little bit of an overwhelming thing to look at. So then I created a professional Facebook page, which is a little bit more metered doses of information on a daily basis. I also have a Twitter feed, which I'm not quite as active on. And then Scoop It plays another social media type of thing that I use. I have one post on Scoop It that's about supporting AAC in the IEP. So if you are interested in skills related to either writing goals or including AAC in the IEP, you can Google that Scoop It on writing goals, and you'll find some information there. So let's get to it. The thing I'm curious about is who are you? So if you can just kind of write in the chat, I'm curious, you know, are you teachers or SLPs? So T's, P's, administrators, I would love this. We have some administrators out there, paraprofessionals, parents and caregivers, or of course, APS. SLP, SLP, lots of SLPs. Oh, an AP consultant. She's like, we're going to have predominantly SLPs, which is wonderful. I think we have a couple of teachers. Yeah, I see an AP person, a learning facilitator. All right, so we have somewhat of a mix, although it's going to be a heavy SLP group, which is, you know, welcome to everybody. Okay, so our objective today, I've got to move my chat window out of the way. There could have been so many things I could have chosen that I'm hoping that you get out of today. What I really, whenever I present, one of the things that I have learned by being someone who attends a lot of professional development, is that the kinds of professional development opportunities that I really enjoy are the ones that when I leave, I feel like there is at least one thing that I can put into practice tomorrow. So that is really my goal, and I try to kind of push my learning objectives in that direction. So, you know, by the end of today's lesson, I hope that you can name three methods for supporting teacher and staff buy-in of best practices in AAC implementation, that you can list three types of contests that can be used to increase exposure and generate excitement about AAC implementation, and to also describe at least three AAC key concepts to be reinforced with who is implementing AAC. So really those are going to be the things that I talk about where I'm going to went in my time as I've gone through the schools. We are generally the biggest roadblocks to successful AAC implementation. So we'll talk a little bit about some of those things and how we can support those in the school. So three assumptions for today. Assumption number one is that AAC implementation practices should be based on research-supported information about core and fringe vocabulary. Since you are lots, you know, many of you are SLPs, I think that you probably know a lot about that, and we are really not going to go into specifics on core and fringe. I hope that you have that background. The assumption is that most of the types of things that we're going to talk about in terms of increasing buy-in and sharing best practices and implementation are going to be based in the fact that we are supporting research-based principles with core and fringe. Second assumption is that aided language simulation or aided language input or partner augmented input, whatever we're calling it, modeling is an absolutely essential component to any successful AAC implementation protocol. And at one point I was asked to write an article for Closing the Gap Solutions Magazine, and when I asked them what they'd like me to write about, they said whatever you want, which was kind of daunting. So when I sat and thought about it, I thought, well, what is the absolute biggest challenge I see as likely through the schools in terms of AAC implementation? And it is most certainly the fact that AAC is not being modeled. And I'm sure many of you are seeing that either in terms of schools where you are, or it's rampant, or you've seen it at least with one teacher, it really does tend to vary. But that is going to be another big piece about how we're going to move forward, is we have to assume that aided language stimulation is absolutely necessary, and we need to increase it across the board. The third assumption is that we cannot expect teachers, therapists, staff, and caregivers to implement AAC successfully without themselves receiving support and modeling from other people. So from professional developers like me, from supervisors, anything that can be done to actually model what you guys need to do is really, really important. So we can't expect anybody really to do anything without having those skills modeled and supported. So we're going to kind of just jump right into it. So how do I implement AAC in my school? So we all know the best practices for supporting language development in AAC users. We know what those are. We know that today's language. We know we should be doing core and fringe. There's lots of things that we know we should be doing. But one of the challenges, at least that I see in my practice that, and I also see globally in my time that I spend on social media talking about AAC and use and issues in AAC implementation, is how do I get buy-in from teachers and staff and families? How do I get them to understand the importance of these best practices and that in their absence, that that's why kids perhaps are not developing language and not using their AAC systems as much as they can, as opposed to them not being able. It all goes back to the fact that we need to be presuming the students' confidence and that we need to assume that we need to be doing the right job to be able to get them to the point they need to get to. Okay. So there's a bunch of methods we're going to talk about and explore when it comes to supporting buy-in of AAC best practices. First, whatever possible, we need to provide coaching as opposed to a single classroom style or webinar-based training. I think so many of us, we go to professional development opportunities. We attend things either virtually or in person and we get some really great information, but then it doesn't always transfer, translate to our practice and our ability to function within our working environment. So it's really, really important that just as kids need modeling to learn language that staff need coaching on what exactly they should be doing and how that looks in practice. The other thing is, another one is that we need to be sharing and posting easily digestible visuals, resources and means. Basically, we want AAC to really be front and center in everybody's consciousness. We want them to be thinking AAC as they walk through their buildings as they're in their classrooms. We need to do a really good job at really kind of almost being public relations experts in AAC. Also, video, we're going to talk about how important video is both in assessing ourselves but also in sharing and getting excitement up. If you catch a really, really great exchange with a student who is learning AAC, it is so powerful to share that with other teachers and families and to really prove what these kids can do. I had a really, really interesting experience that was just very eye-opening earlier in the year. So I had a SET meeting, so I'm not sure if you guys are using the SET process, but we were talking about exploring ways we could further implement. It was a kiddo who already had a particular app in place and had lots of language ability but wasn't really using the device that much at home. And the parents came in and initially they were very, very upset and they felt that I should change. The child has a pretty extensive core-based user. I believe it's an iPad mini with a 60 location robust core user with an app. And the parents came in saying that they wanted full sentences and they wanted to get rid of the core on the front screen and they were very, very angry. And I was trying to go through and trying to provide some explanations of why it was that way and they were still very angry. It just so happened, though, that the kiddo was in the meeting because it was before school. And while we were talking, the child took his device and went around to different people in the room and was using it to communicate. And all of a sudden the parents completely shifted gears and they were able to get away from being angry and start really understanding how core worked and how what he could actually do. They had no idea what her son was able to do with language without having actually seen what he was doing. So if it can't be in person like we had that opportunity there and usually it can't, then video was really our next best thing. We need to get creative with wearable and portable core. We'll talk about how we can do that. We need to make modeling fun, use prompt prompts. One of the things that I am absolutely intent on sharing with the world is the need for engagement in AAC learning just as we need engagement in every type of learning. If they're bored, it's certainly not going to be the same learning experience. Using contests to share best practices and drum up excitement and sharing best practices also to provide positive feedback, encouragement and success stories. You know, when we have teams, this is not an easy process, teaching students in special education and teaching kids with complex communication needs. So if you see someone doing a great job modeling that we really need to start doing a better job at calling that out, saying what a great job, catching really positive things, not just making suggestions about what can be changed. Another thing is so that we talked about using video a little bit. Alright, so back to the coaching model. It absolutely works. I'm not sure how many of you have learned about, there is a coaching module that is from Dr. Jill Center and Matt Baud out of Chicago. It's called Partner Augmented Input. You can find them on the web. I will put links to that in your handout as well. And it's really a eight step coaching model on teaching aided language simulation. They call it Partner Augmented Input, but really it's the same thing. It's that we are modeling AAC, we're providing input in the way that we're expecting output. So with coaching, like in their model, it is absolutely essential for teachers, staff and families. It doesn't require a tremendous time commitment. If we follow Dr. Center and Matt Baud's process, it's really only about 15 hours. But even in less than that, we can really, really make some notable changes. It follows the same principles which tell us that aided language is necessary for AAC learning. So if aided language is necessary for language use with symbols with AAC users, then clearly that modeling type of thing is really what we need as well if we want to learn how to do that modeling. It also supports team buy-in if we have that coaching. So here's Matt Baud and Dr. Jill Center. And again, it's called Partner Augmented Input and SMORS. So SMORS is the mnemonic they use. It's research-based. It has eight very well-described steps. And that SMORS, you know, it can really help in terms of people remembering what each step is. There are visuals along with that. So let's take a look. So here is one of their visual supports for SMORS. It means, you know, slow rates that we need to be modeling, and we point while doing self and parallel talk. We have to respect what kids say and reflect back to acknowledge what we've heard them say. We need to repeat words and repeat what they said as much as we possibly can. We know that we cannot possibly come to the same amount of models that a typical language learner gets, a typical speaker gets. So the much, you know, as much as we can do, the more the better. Also, expanding that, you know, if we have a child that comes over to us and says pretzel, then we should be expanding that. We should say, oh, did you want a pretzel? Do you like the pretzel? Do you want more pretzel? Is it a disgusting pretzel? You know, all those kinds of things, the same way we would do when typical early language learning kiddos come up to us and give us one word. We naturally expand that. We need to do the same thing. The other is just that whole thing about expect and pauses and how absolutely essential those are. So these are really, really nice frameworks. You'll see when you get the handout, I am going to give you exact copies of the slides. So you'll see many of them will have links, live links where you can go and download resources. You will also have my email in the handout, and if there is anything that I talked about that for some reason is not in the handout, I do try to make it pretty comprehensive. I really just give my slides and then some resources in addition. But if there is anything that you need that I can possibly share, you can just send me a direct email. Say, hey, I was watching your webinar and you mentioned this. Can you please send me a resource? And I'll be more than happy to do that. So in terms of posting and sharing easily digestible things, you know, if we put up a handout, the handout can be full of lots of words and information. I think things need to be really, really kind of easy and quick at a glance or they tend to get put in a drawer. So this, I'm not sure if any of you have ever seen this particular support. This is something I developed when I realized that we needed something that was super clear that could be put on desks, put on walls, attached to devices that was very, very quick and easy. You know, this is something we shouldn't do when we're supporting an AAC user and these are the things that we really should do. So that is freely downloadable. There are two different versions. This is the AAC boot camp version, which I had initially appended as a poster size, either in a regular size sheet or if you're lucky enough to have the ability to use a poster printer, you can create them that way. And I have another version, which I'll make sure that I include in the handout. That is a 4x6 card that also includes if lost, which is intended to be attached to kids' devices. So if you have a kid with an iPad or a dedicated device, it could either be packing tape to the back of the device or it can be laminated with that hard maybe three or five mil laminates. It's on those cheap little laminators that we get and plug in. And then we can pop a hole in that and use something like a cable key ring. I'm not sure if you've ever seen those. You can look them up on Amazon. They have them at places like Home Depot. I don't know if they have Home Depot in Canada. But hopefully something like that, you know, a large hardware store. But usually in the key section, you'll see these little, it's a little circular. It's basically a key ring made of, it looks like steel cable, but it has threads and it screws together. So they're really great to attach laminated cards and other kinds of supports to devices because they're harder for kids to unscrew and get off and harder for things to get lost. So that is the AAC Bootcamp. Another thing that can really be nice is memes. So we can print, post, and share memes. The nice thing that I find about memes is that it can share some suggestions with folks about what they should be doing or what they should not be doing. But it does so in a bit more gentle of a manner and adds humor. So whereas you actually might be incredibly frustrated and angry that every time you walk into a classroom, the talker or the device, whatever they're calling it, is in a cubby or is in a drawer or is in a backpack. Suddenly when it is part of a meme, it at least brings a chuckle in many cases. So they can be gentler, funnier than judicial reminders, and they are things that can be not only posted broadly around buildings. They can be swapped out, so they can be kind of changing. One of the things that I've always said, I have kind of a work sense of humor, is that, you know, put them on the inside of the doors in the bathroom stalls because then you have captive readers. And then swap them out each week so you know people are going to read that when they're, you know, people do that. So I do have, if you were interested in learning about some of the memes that other people have done, I do have a specific Pinterest board on my Pinterest site, which is under my name, Lauren S. Enders, M-A-C-C-C-S-L-P. Again, there will be a link in the handout that every meme I have ever seen related to AAC that I at least felt made some sense. You know, once in a while there's some that I don't quite get, but most of them I have shared there. So there are already made ones that you can use and download and print. That's what that board looks like. At the time when I had created this image, I had 297 memes, signs, and posters. I believe it's probably more now because the screenshot is maybe a couple months old. So there is that Pinterest page. Another thing that is super fun is creating your own meme. So, you know, what if you had a weekly contest in a school where you created memes and then, you know, it could be the janitors that are rating them or it could be the students that are rating their favorites, but think about, you know, because they are fun, it might be a really great way to drum up excitement and bring some humor. So there are websites and there are also apps. So there are websites that we can use online that are just free to create some memes and then share them. There are also apps that allow us to generate memes, both free and paid, and you can find them both on the iTunes, the App Store, and you can also find them if you have access to an Android, you know, a phone or a tablet. You can also find them on the Google Play Store. So, Lenny, I'm actually going to come out of sharing my screen for a minute. I just want to show you what these meme generators look like. So I'm going to go on. So here is memegenerator.net. Okay. And what happens is they have a whole bunch of images that can be used for memes. So we've got some kind of, you know, we've got the dinosaur. We've got Grumpy Cat. We've got things that they have used. And then I believe you can upload your own as well in here, although I'm not sure with this particular one, but in many you can. So just as an example, so let's say if I kind of scroll down and I'm going to do something about having talkers left in backpacks. Let's see. What can I do? I'm just going to use caption and image. Well, how about this? We'll just use piano reads because he's the first to come up. So I'm going to use that particular image where he looks pretty horrified and dumbfounded across the top. I might say something like, what? And at the bottom, you left her talker in her. And then we say generate. We can generate in different languages. It takes a little, it takes a couple of moments. And there it is. And then we can share it. And we have different ways we can share it on Facebook. We can email it to ourselves. So really, really cool and super, super easy and brief. So they're kind of fun. Go back to my presentation. Hopefully you're seeing all that. Are you able to see that? Hopefully it's in the chat. If you can let me know. Were you able to see that demo? Yeah, Lauren, that worked great. All right. Awesome. All right. So you can have contests, which would be lots of fun. Another thing that you can do is that we can easily find now, we can find inkjet printer magnets, or we can find magnets that already exist. And then just kind of like in this picture, you just kind of plunk some symbols on there that we can start to have symbols be a real part of the school community and have them all over the place. So you could do them as signed, but that you just print them out. You can do them as magnets. One of the things that would be great in posting these things is what I find, and I'm sure that many of you have the same experience, that when teams are implementing AAC, the things that get implemented most are teaching requesting. Once the needs, which obviously that's very important that we do that, but sometimes we don't go beyond that. And I think, especially since you are a group of many of you are SLPs, you know that communication has so many purposes and functions, and it goes way beyond requesting. So using something like this, we can support asking questions. At the door, you could have a language magnet that said, where are we going? And you can have the symbols for that. In the bathroom, you know, did you wash your hands? Different kinds of things. So it just would give you an easy opportunity to create either signs on paper or magnets in places that, you know, that you have access to a metal surface. And then just again, we want to bring AAC and symbol use much more into the consciousness, not just of the special education teachers of the paraprofessionals of the therapists. We really want this to be a part of the entire school community if we really want this to take off and people to take ownership. So I gave some examples at the bottom that you can, you know, provide examples of how you would form questions. And then you can do them simply as comments as well. But this is just one example. Right. So sharing videos, really, really, really important is using video of showing awesome AAC implementation and what does that look like. So we need to, one of the things is we need to be careful to watch and select video from experienced clinicians, teachers, and parents. One of the challenges I see sometimes is, you know, of course, you know, the way of the world, not everybody has the same experience in AAC. Unfortunately, in some cases, we do have people that may be providing information or providing videos that are not quite as experienced. So I think it is important to know where you're getting your supports from. Are these people with, you know, a lot of experience that have the same beliefs in what best practices are that you do? For example, you know, are they an advocate of poor? Do they believe in a language? And then when you, we can talk about some of the people that really do have some awesome videos out there, some awesome clinicians and teachers and even parents who have great video out there. We need to choose videos that show implementation in varying environments. It can't always be at the dinner table. It can't always be in school. When people find video, the most helpful is when they can associate it with times when they, with their individuals that they're working with, the same kind of environment. So we want to make sure that we're looking at video in a variety of environments and with a variety of communication tasks. You also want to make sure that when you are sharing video with teams, that you are choosing videos that show students with similar needs using similar systems. So although, you know, we may find lots of videos out there that show aided language with direct collectors. If you are working with a team that is supporting almost entirely, either scanners or eye gaze users, it's not going to be as helpful to them if you are showing them videos of kids direct selecting. And I have absolutely seen that happen. And typically people get, you know, they may start tuning you out because they're like, well, that's not my kid. That's not what my kids look like. So even though the techniques are somewhat similar, it's going to be much, much more effective if they are seeing kids that have needs similar to the ones that they're working with or their own children, regardless of who's using that. The other thing is we need to not only be looking at video of others, it's really, really key to start recording yourself. I know that when I record myself and I watch myself, it is a wealth of information about all the things that I do that I really wish I probably didn't do. And if I didn't watch myself, I wouldn't know. I definitely talk too fast. And although I know, I certainly know better in terms of expectant pauses and I typically count in my head, it can still be helpful to watch myself working with individuals with the devices to determine am I really waiting enough? Did I miss attempts at communication? Sometimes I do. So really using video not only as a way to model, to learn from experts, but also to learn about what you're doing yourself, either get feedback from someone with a lot of experience or even to just watch yourself and get some ideas there. YouTube can be a really, really wonderful source of video support. So for example, if you're going in, you're supporting a team and you do talk about aided language and maybe you've had that opportunity to have one or two trainings where you talk about aided language and you have that classroom style training. But again, like I mentioned in the very beginning, that classroom style training where you go over the principles of aided language and you talk about why it's essential and why in its absence we won't have AAC use. That often kind of ends and fizzles, maybe a week, maybe two weeks after that, although maybe there was some excitement initially without seeing it in practice, it can be much, much less effective. So we can find sources of videos. Now I do have a Pinterest page of Aided Language Implementation of videos, so that's there as well. But there's some really, really great YouTube channels. So for example, Aided Language in the classroom environment with Big Core, which we'll talk about a little bit. And I'm not sure how much we're going to have to blaze through some things because I think I'm, you know, explaining a little bit more than I intended to. I'm kind of worried, you know, I'm an SLP, it happens. So we talked from Amy Devin and Lauren Paolowski. They are advocates of Big Core and they work together. They have some great videos on what it looks like even in the classroom situation of using that. Ada Hearn is a fabulous source and she's great because she has a lot of different access methods in her videos. She has kids that are direct selecting, she has eye gaze users. She's always a wealth of information and has just really, really good practical experience at levels that many of us do not get. You know, her whole job is working with AAC users and teaching them language and teaching them literacy, so lots there. And Tate Nova, of course, you know, an absolute pioneer in our field and with core vocabulary and teaching implementation and really creating fabulous communicators in her clients and those that she teaches. We Speak Pod is a parent, Karen Owens, who has implemented Pod with her own family and is doing a phenomenal job of documenting exactly what that looks like and uploading lots and lots of videos to either YouTube or her Facebook page. We can get creative with wearable and portable core. So there are things like hand signs, should I have a hand sign? No, I don't think I brought a hand sign over. Velcro friendly apron. You can have core put onto pillowcases at places like Zazzle and Cafe Press, not sure where else. Lanyards, so wearable and portable core. So what I did here, if you can see, is I took the board, I shrunk it down, I cut it in half, I used hard laminate after I cut it in half, and then I attached it with packing tape. And that way I can wear it on a lanyard. And I have some of these, I'm not sure if you've ever seen these scotch removable clear mounting squares. They're a nice alternative to Velcro in some instances. It's kind of excused for lack of a better way to describe them. I always call them glue boogies. You know those things, when you get a pot or a pan and your label is stuck to your pot or a pan with one of these things, that's what they are. You can find them at places, you know, all over the place, Walmart, Amazon. They use, in addition to using Velcro, so you could have, you're wearing, you have your core with you all the time and you're able to model. If there are particular words that you're focusing on, you could actually put them on the back. So everybody could be wearing these from the teachers to even peers, even the janitor or the principal. We could have them wearing that. We really want to make an environment rich with AAC. Risk coaches, this was an idea that I first heard about from Kelly Key and Deidre Dobles. I never know how to say her name. I'm sorry, Deidre. These are made for football plays. So you get them at sporting goods stores or on Amazon. And you can, they have either single panels or they have a little flip up where there's two and you can put little things in there and they can be worn on an arm. Or, you know, if you had somebody, I guess on an arm or a wrist, they're pretty cool. Place mats. We can make place mats out of, we can take language boards with their core and then some key friends and send them home to families and show them how they can be implementing core at home. Retractable badges, those things that you wear on your hip with a pull stick cord, they could be hanging from there. And then I do have one showing down on the left here. What happens when you're in the bathtub? Well, get a garden kneeling pad. You can laminate a board and that way you have access to your board in the bath and it floats or simply put a board onto a piece of very thin craft foam and it will stick to the wall of the shower with surface tension. So lots of interesting ideas there. The other thing is, you know, I talked about engagement. We need to make this fun. So if we do some things to make modeling more fun, we draw attention, we can do so with pointing props. So they may look like, you know, witch fingers. Doesn't everybody have a bag of like, you know, 80 of these? I'm not sure how many came in this. But I give these out of training when we're playing, working with core boards. So they're super fun. So suddenly it's a little bit more interesting to point. If you've got a witch finger, we can use hand pointers. We can use, no, this is actually a laser pointer, but it looks like a Lego. So we can, I really like using laser pointers for modeling because it kind of gets kids ass out of our faces. One of the things that I've really learned this year is I've spending a lot of time in schools and supporting staff and supporting their kids. There's a lot of kids that do their best to physically push me out of the way when I try to get in there and model. So if we use something like, you know, a pointer or a laser pointer, we can really kind of respect their wishes not to have us completely in their space. Witch fingers, the little eyes you can see on the screen down below. Those can stick on your finger. You can buy those online at novelty places. Pen lights can be used. So really cool kind of interesting things that you can use and simple. You can put their manual board in something that allows you to write on it so that if you were focusing on a particular word or a couple of words, they can be erased and you can focus on a different word than other day and you can have them help you find the word, things like that. Make it a contest as supervisors for money for prizes or even contact vendors or app developers for donated prizes. Share rules along with a deadline including teachers and staff and families and then you can recruit judges from your staff. I mean it could be the janitors, it could be the principal, it could be peers, have kids be guest judges and you can do a lot with that. So for example, a contest, one of them was CMI AAC from Cater Herne. You could do a staff and peer modeling contest. You could do a meme creation contest, a parent modeling contest. So one of the examples of parent modeling challenge, they did on Speak for Yourself, an uncommon sense blog. Both of those from Dana Neeter who is a mom who has a child who uses AAC and she's gone back to school to be an SLP. And she did some really great work in a parent modeling challenge that can be sent home. Cater Herne did a CMI AAC where she posted rules on social media that, you know, post your pictures of AAC youth in the wild. So in the community, at school, at home, really anywhere AAC might be and should be used and then judges picked a winner and they receive a prize. So she used social media posts but in your school you could have people email photo entries to you. There's so many things you could do. I just want to give you some, you know, thoughts and ideas about how you, you know, might be generating excitement. This is something I'm going to put a link to the video in the handout. I'm not going to show this full video because it's kind of long. This is just out of the submissions that Kate or Herne, I can just kind of see, hover over it. Let's see, just to show you the beginning of what they've been. She created a little video. All right, so she goes through and she took all the photos that she received in the CMI AAC contest from all those submissions that she created a video. So that's something that you could do with the submissions you receive in your school and then you could play it, especially if you have something like a school TV news program, which a lot of schools now have. Run your own AAC meme contest. Give staff lists of best practices. So give them the AAC boot camp or, you know, another support. Give them rules, you know, they need to submit their meme. They can win a prize, whether that be AAC swag, like t-shirts that you get printed or app codes or coffee gift cards. Involve regular ed peers, staff members. Post those memes everywhere in the school and make sure that you rotate them so that, you know, we don't stop paying attention to them. This is a part about congratulating successes, both big and small. So we need to catch teachers, staff, peers and family members for when they're providing awesome AAC, you know, communication support. Leave notes for a job well done. Call out great behaviors. Here from Practical AAC, there's some links. You can probably look them up, but again, they will be in the handout. You can just download bookmarks that say, hey, you did a great job modeling or, you know, there were a couple of different suggestions. Catch great modeling and student successes on video. So make sure you have releases on all your kiddos that you can get releases signed for so that you can then, you know, have video to kind of show their success to whether it's their family that says, look, your kid really can do this or show a teacher who seems to be reluctant to believe that this child is not too low. We do hear that sometimes. He's too low. He can't do it. If you catch them doing it and you catch somebody modeling well and then the child being successful, they're more likely to have some bias. So again, power of video. Make sure you get those releases signed. Reviewing video lets you catch your mistakes, let you catch your successes. It lets you observe student challenges outside of the situation. And it lets you share those with the team and the family, those successes. If you need more help in implementing something that's district-wide or school-wide, Deidra and Kelly do lots of webinars. There are lots of conferences, AT conferences. They think Kelly recently did a webinar on the ATIA site. They do a lot on core-based initiatives and district-wide focus. So keep an eye out for some of the resources from them. Big core. We're going to go through really quickly, but big core is something that I have been implementing this year with one particular team where I have administrative support. And it has been fabulously successful where we are, you know, we are modeling extensive use of, you know, we're using aided language throughout the day in those classrooms. Whether the kids have natural speech or they are using AAC, it doesn't matter. It helps everybody. It helps us build fluency with aided language when it's up there and always there. It validates using symbols for communication, using AAC. It supports language immersion. You know, why would we use it if there's only one or two AAC users? You know, think about that. Well, you know, I bet you have a couple ideas because we have lots of SLTs in here and teachers. Well, you know, big core benefits for kids who use natural speech. Well, it slows down our rate of speech if we have to find it on the board, which can help their processing. It forces us to simplify our language because we're trying to use the language with core that's on the board. It provides visual input to aid in the students' processing. And it also provides peers. If there are kids who are not using AAC, it lets them see how they can model for their peers who are using AAC. So there's some great resources. You can go on to practicalaac.org and search Big Core. You can subscribe to Sweet Talk, a YouTube channel I mentioned earlier with Amy Devin with Lauren Palowski. There's also projectcore.com. If you're not familiar with Project Core, incredible, incredible resource for core-based support, intervention modules, really a wealth of information there. We're not going to watch this, but I want you to be aware that one of the things that's on Sweet Talk is this Tips for Big Core. Again, you're going to get that as a link. Keep it easy whenever possible. Print ready-made files for Big Core. Don't necessarily reinvent the wheel. Most of the AAC companies and AAC apps, they have principal versions of their home screen. You can use that. If you've got three kids with TouchChat and one with ProLoco, use TouchChat. The kids will be fine. You pick one and go with it. As long as they are seeing symbol use, it usually works just fine. Consider where most of your instruction will take place and put that. So if you happen to instruct in the beginning, in the front of the room and the back of the room, then we want either a core board on foam core or on an easel with wheels that can be removed around or to have posters in both areas. So you can use Project Core, Unity and Lamp has some options. WordPower, which is available through NovaChat and on TouchChat, on the iPad. ProLoco2Go, there's lots of options out there. Again, you will have this all in the slides with working links. It'll take a couple days to get that out there, but you will have it. You also have my email to ask me for anything you need. Speak for YourSouth has some CoughDrop, which is their multi-platform robust option that works on Android and Windows and other kinds of devices that we're seeing used. That also has some printouts and you can create your own with things like BoardMaker or lesson picks or symbol sticks or smarty symbols. Another thing to consider is that when you do create a board that you can have pull-off. So you just put a second one right on top. You can print on corrugated plastic. You can use tri-fold foam core or cardboard displays. You can use pocket charts like they use for counting and education or like they use for baseball cards. Lots of ideas there. You can do high-tech big cores. So you can mirror your interactive version on PC like pre-PRCs, new voice software or saw pillows, chat editor software, or you can air-play iOS apps like Proloquo or TouchChat or anything that's being used on an iPad via Apple TV or there are apps that allow you to mirror the iOS to the computer. So in the general education classroom, you often need to kind of get that buy-in. So what I do is I present the peers, the teachers, and the staff. It's about 30 minutes. And I talk about a lot of things about AAC. So there I am. I'm sitting. I have a little guy who is the device user. He's sitting there right next to me. I talk about lots of things. So if the child is comfortable, I make them the expert and I have them help me talk about their talker and how they use it and what it lets them do. The kids sitting, the regular ad peers absolutely love this. And what I usually do is I talk to the kids. I define IT. I tell them. I look around the room and usually there's at least one kid wearing glasses or a hearing aid. And I look around the room and I see somebody that has assistive technology and they all look at each other and then I ask if they can get to and I try to figure out. They genuinely don't. And then I say, I talk about how glasses and hearing aids are assistive technology and the AAC is another kind of assistive technology. I show different types. I explain that it is the child who's using it. It's either their voice or one of their voices that they talk also. I talk about how it's very important just like someone doesn't reach into their throat when they're talking and use their voice. We can't just reach into somebody's device and touch without getting permission to talk to them with their talker. I also talk about age-appropriate support for their peers. I say, you know, your friend Johnny who uses a talker, it's even possible he could be older than you. So we want to make sure we don't talk to him like he's younger or a baby. We see that a lot in the peers that really want to help. Okay. So encouraging school-wide buy-in. Really, really helpful to have your principal or your LEA attend that peer presentation. Regular Ed class additions. We can put big core boards in regular Ed rooms. We can put symbols around the room. We can have those wearables we talked about earlier. Manual boards for every student in the class. Doesn't matter whether they talk. Doesn't matter whether they're regular Ed and gifted in the class with their AAC user. We can have everybody have manual boards. And then as teachers go around and give instructions, always modeling. Doesn't matter which kid they're working with, whether they are device user or not. I know I'm giving you lots of information and we only had an hour. I'm kind of blazing through. But I want to at least have you leave with some resources that you can use. So this is a really, really fabulous resource that I don't know that everybody knows about. It's relatively new in the last year that it's been put out. It is absolutely free by the master gal from Gail Vante and herself in cooperation with Patton, which is the Pennsylvania Department of Education. It's the training and technical assistance network. And it's free. There are modules. There are 12 of them. Free professional development is always awesome. It's talking about partner skills and opportunities and words and evidence and resources. There are modules. There's six, let's see, 12 modules that talk about all kinds of AAC implementation. You go through them. It's self-directed. It's free. Definitely highly recommend using those. We also have lots of other resources now. We have assisted wears core word classroom. We have project core. We have AAC Scotland's online learning modules. So if you have administrator support, perhaps they could give incentives for completing some of these. Whether they get 15 minutes extra prep time or something if they earn the best professional development award or they do it quickest. Again, you can kind of use that whole contest idea. Another really, really fabulous resource if you're looking for implementation ideas and support that you can give to your staff that can make their implementation easier is Language Lab. Now it is put out by PRC, which is, you know, the makers of the PRC products like Accents and as well as the LAMP app on the iPad. But although they are produced by that company and they do talk about the unity and the min-speak symbols, the concepts and the activities are absolutely, you know, so, so super beneficial to anybody supporting a core-based AAC system. It used to be $84 a year for all the resources in Language Lab, which I actually thought was worth the $84 a year. And now at $19.95 a year subscription, I really think it's a steal. So if you do have that in your budget or you have an administrator who will provide that at least one in a building, that would be, you know, an awesome resource. Supporting families. We can support families by sending home those one-pagers like the Bootcamp. We can send home links to videos of what it should look like. So, you know, get yourself on video, you know, how you work with their child and what they do so they know what they can expect of their child and they know what their modeling should look like. Share blogs, share social media groups that talk about AAC. You could have, you know, once a month or every few months you could have AAC night activities if you have that ability to use a building or if you have administrative support. Provide placemats, provide, you know, shower or bathroom laminated versions of their device screens so that you can really talk about the fact that AAC has to be everywhere. You really want to make sure you're reviewing with your staff key concepts of AAC, you know, best practices. So that thought about we must, must, must have that expectant pause. You know, I tell people they are probably going to need to count in their head that we as humans we have this intense desire to help and what comes along with that is intensive over prompting. And what we do is every time we prompt we actually restart their processing and we start them at square one and eventually we end up giving them the answer and then what we learn is they have developed learned helplessness. We have basically, you know, accidentally unintentionally taught them that they need all of our prompts and that we'll eventually just kind of give them the answer. And it's certainly not intended but it happens. So that expectant pause. The other, this is a great graphic from Dr. Caroline Musselwhite that we have to really look at the way we are teaching AAC. A lot of times inadvertently we are basically testing all day long and that is not the way we learn language. All of you SLPs who are sitting out of there, sitting out there, you know we don't learn language because someone sits down flash cards. What is this? What is this? What is this? A lot of times however we see people when there are kids with AAC systems looking to do testing all day long. So we need to be interacting. We need to be giving interesting, interacting activities with topics that interest kids that are engaging in learning language that way through modeling, not just testing all day. Another key is that we, I alluded to this earlier, is that we have to be targeting more than just requesting. This was a meme I did, you know, just out of my own frustration and when I'm work going through schools is that, you know, well, he just needs to be able to share as once in need. Well, you know, imagine if that's all you could do. You could ask for something in order in a restaurant. We like to complain and paddle and ask questions. Think about kids. Some of the earliest things that they do are they, you know, why? Why? Where are we going? What are we doing? A lot of our AAC users, they're graduating, they're aging out of age 21 and nobody has taught them in model question asking. So really, really key to support that. You know, you can post reminders about the communication functions beyond requesting and choice making that they should be considering. We need to be considering that typically developing kids are combining words super early. So thinking about that as we are a supporting staff and they're modeling, they should be modeling phrases, not just single words, even from very, very early on. Thoughts about the number of words you model. You know, if you have, that just really comes back to the types of systems and the types of big core, or core boards you have, the more vocabulary the better because if the vocabulary is not there for you to model, they are certainly not going to learn it. And I know I'm certain that I'm preaching to the choir, but I just, I'm trying to condense all these kinds of things that are really, really key for you to provide support to your staff for AAC. So a rule of thumb, we should be modeling utterances that are one to two words beyond the kiddos level. They are coming up to us and saying, book, weighted blanket. Then we went, oh, you want a weighted blanket. Oh, you like that book, or you like that blue book. We need to be expanding just like we saw in the S'mores protocol from Dr. Center and Matt Bot. So we are, we have five minutes left, and I did kind of blow through because I didn't want to, I didn't want to not get to anything. But is there, are there any questions before I, you know, I can go in and show you a couple of other supports, but are there any questions out there that I can answer in our last, you know, four minutes, maybe at this point? So let's make a pregnant pause here because we'll see if people do have any questions. And yeah, I'm seeing people going awesome resources and absolutely that I have a few of Lauren's memes and little handouts around the office here. So I hope that you take them and put those out into your world as well. Yeah, functional implementation resources. Yeah, this was like a filling your toolkit with ideas resources. I think really wonderful stuff. Love the memes. So I'm not really seeing any questions. I think probably the first question that would come to my mind is when is this going to be up and posted so I can go through it again? Yeah. What I'm thinking is it's probably going to be posted. You know, I can get it. I can probably get it. It is Wednesday. I can promise it will be posted. I will send the information to you, Kathy, by the weekend. So absolutely at the latest on Monday. All right. I will shoot. I promise I will shoot for earlier. We are, I'm sure as many of you are having the same experience. It's the time of year, particularly, you know, the SLPs and the AT consultants. It's the time of year that there just seems to be this huge crunch. So being that I work full-time in the schools and, you know, I certainly have more work than I can even handle. I'm finding myself working later and later. So I just don't want to tell you it's going to be ready tomorrow when, you know, it's very possible that I may be doing, you know, work until 11 o'clock at night. Yeah, well, no worries. And I'm going to give you a little bit of breathing space because it's very unlikely that I will get this video. We have to get it rendered and I need to bring it over to ERLC blah, blah, blah to get it up. So that won't likely happen before Tuesday of next week. So I'll try and get them both at the same time. I do see a question up there that I can answer. So we have three minutes. And I love that you asked that. So Olivia asked that she doesn't have much AAC experience. So thank you for attending. There is no minimal amount of experience. It's really what I always say to people, I don't care if you don't have any experience. What I want to see is interest and willingness and the rest will come. So thank you for attending. Your question was can I give examples of core versus fringe vocabulary? Absolutely. So core vocabulary, if you were to take a language sample of anybody, so anybody in any country, any language, if we do an analysis of that language sample, what we find is about 80% of anybody's vocabulary are really the same high-power reusable words that we combine in new and novel ways every time we speak. And about 80% of our language is comprised of those words. And those words come from all of our parts of speech. And they are words like pronouns like I, you, he, she, they. They're words like action words like verbs, go, stop, want, like, think. Words that we use over and over again, describing words, adjectives, happy, sad, gross, stinky. All of those are kinds of words that we use over and over again. When we look at what the other maybe 20% of our language is comprised of, they are personally relevant words. They're called fringe vocabulary in that they are very specific to a particular individual. So if we looked at my fringe vocabulary, words like AAC and iPad and device and modeling and partner augmented, those would be part of my personal core. And if I was going to, if I had laryngitis and needed to be speaking about these things, I would need some of those words in addition to the more common core words on my device. With kids, it may be, you know, veggie straws or Elmo. So words that are personally relevant to that particular individual. So when we create a system, what we want to do is we want to mirror that amount. So 80% of their words that they have access to should be core words. Sorry about that. And then about 20% is words that are personally relevant to them. And what I usually do is I send out a vocabulary questionnaire to the team, including the family. And that gets that, you know, who are the people that are important to this child? And what do they like to do? And what do they eat? What do they love to eat? What do they hate to eat? It's kind of long. But what that allows me to do is then customize, we have all that core vocabulary, but then I can make sure that they have those things that are super relevant to them. I can also make sure the handout has a link to that vocabulary questionnaire. Yeah, I'm going to just say one thing. I just put a link in the chat for everybody that shows where this information will be, as well as that's the link to where all of our other webinars are archived. And interestingly enough, I did one yesterday where I explained in more detail some of the, I guess, conceptual stuff that Lauren has given us so many wonderful, practical, it really was quite, I'm going, oh, this is a great one to punch, and we didn't even plan it. So we, if you want to, if you are a little bit newer to some of these ideas, you want to go back in there. The session that I did yesterday will give you more of the idea of the concepts behind it. What Lauren just did was a beautiful example of how to actually make, bring core and fringe to life practically for a kiddo. So again, as usual, we will share everything that, so that vocabulary questionnaire, absolutely. We'll put that in. That sounds. And as I said, there's the link. I'll also send that link out to everyone again just to make sure that you do have it. And now, because I do want to honor Lauren's time, as well as yours, I just want to say thank you very much. That was like getting a lovely spray of wonderful resources. And I know, and you are the social media queen. I pay homage to you every day in that regard, but that's wonderful. And it is so practical for us to have those places to go. So thank you, Lauren. We, on behalf of all of us, I really appreciate the stuff and your time and hope to see you again soon. Maybe pace to pace our virtually. So thank you so much. All right. Thank you. Bye. Good night, everyone.