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She's a fire she's following.
If you work with children who use high-tech AAC, today's episode is a cannot miss. I'm gonna show you how to use storybooks and high-tech AAC to improve children's communication skills. I'm gonna show you a method that I've developed, under the acronym MODEL, M-O-D-E-L, that'll guide you through the storybook reading process in helping children optimize their AAC skills.
Before I dive in: a mindset shift for you when it comes to high-tech AAC, because many are not comfortable when they see these programs that have thousands of words embedded in them. They don't know where the words are, and they feel like, "I can't use that program unless I've attended a continuing ed course.
I can't use that program unless I have an instruction manual on how to use it, or I have a cheat sheet." You don't need that. Instead, I want you to compare the high-tech AAC device to a remote control. When you go to a hotel in another city and all the channels are different, you have hundreds of channels, and you have this remote control.
Now, you're not even gonna see a channel guide anymore. There's no need for a channel guide. How are you gonna find out where all the channels are? Easy. You're gonna roll up your sleeves and you're just gonna start pushing buttons. If you're like me, when I go to a hotel, I wanna know every channel.
I wanna know all 300 channels. I wanna know where the golf channel is, which I will never watch. But I wanna know the lay of the land, I wanna explore it. We have some Spanish channels here. I wanna know everything. So what you're gonna do when you go and, when you get this device, is you're gonna explore.
You're just gonna roll up your sleeves and say, "Oh, what's behind this category? What's behind that category? Let's push lots of buttons and find the lay of the land." And that is exactly how you're gonna learn how to use this device from doing-
not from passively seeing a training, not from looking at a book or a cheat sheet,
it's just like how you learned how to use Google Docs, just how you learned how to use Google Slides, how you learned how to use Microsoft Word. You just learned how to use it from using it.
Think about how important it is that you're fluent with the child's program.
Maybe you don't know where a word is. You're like, "I don't even know where to begin." Every device that you work with is going to have a Find key in which you can type the word in and press Find. Then they're gonna show you this is the category it's under, and this, the page it's under.
It's right here. They're gonna highlight it for you and make it easy, and you're gonna follow along and push, and you're gonna know where it is. That means you're gonna have one step ahead of the child. You're going to know where it is, where the child might not know where the symbol is because you know how to use the Find key, and you can spell, and you can write the, the key in and know where it is that way.
So we have that zone of proximal development plus one. You are in that plus one zone of proximal development. Why is it so important you learn how to use these high-tech AAC devices? Children don't speak a language that no one else speaks. If the child speaks sign language, why would the child sign with you if you do not speak sign language?
And why would the child sign with peers that do not speak sign language? If the child speaks this language and is using this high-tech device, why would they use it with you if you never use the device? Or another child, if the other children never use the device. If you want the child to interact with using the device, you need to speak the language.
You too need to be able to use the device, and you can develop fluency in a very short time, from simple experience. Just like with the remote control. So the first night, you're seeing the lay of the land. By the third night at the hotel, you know where your favorite channels are. You've memorized the numbers to get to your favorite channels.
You have the motor plans in. What's gonna happen with this device? With a little bit of experience, it's gonna become automatic, and you're gonna be like, "I know where the foods are, I know where the people are, I know where the toys are. I've done this a few times. I know the lay of the land."
It just has to do with experience. Hands-on experience is the only way that we're gonna learn. The approach I'm gonna teach you is a model, and it starts with the letter M. So M is for model, the first letter in the word model. I really want you to think about doing a completion prompt, and what is going to get the child to the channel, if you think of it that way.
So Thursday night, I wanna watch Project Runway. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a fashion designer. I love that show. It's on Hulu. So I'm gonna get the child to Hulu, and it's gonna have all of the shows displayed, and then they're gonna pick Project Runway.
This is a fun book, 'Dear Zoo'. I'm good at picking fun books out. I have a really nice library that, I got a grant for, and I made it multimodal, and I'm going to write another grant, and hope to double the, library next year. I'm always adding new books.
Dear Zoo by Rod Campbell, is really, really fun, and when we look at that, it's like you're looking to write the zoo for a pet, and they sent me... And they have different animals. Let's go to my favorite. They sent me a giraffe. That's my favorite zoo animal of all, but he was too tall. I sent him back.
When we model, we wanna find that giraffe, so we're going to go to the channel. Now, here you're gonna see on this device, this is LAMP for Life I'm using. We have 84 symbols on the page. This is just an example.
I'm gonna get him to the Hulu channel. Gonna get him to the zoo animal channel, or channel. I was thinking about my Project Runway. So I'm gonna say, "Animals." What kind of animals? There are zoo animals. Now he sees all of the options. Now he gets to find the giraffe. Okay, where is that giraffe?
And you can always just talk aloud like you're thinking in your own head: where is the giraffe? And then the child is going to find the giraffe, and if the child doesn't find the giraffe, this is opportunity. Now I'm giving him the O, the opportunity to find the giraffe.
You don't want him to be too frustrated and waiting too long for the child to find that giraffe, but you don't want to wait too little, so they don't have enough time to find it. So there'll be... Every child's gonna be different. Some children, you can wait 10 seconds, and they're going to find that.
And some children, three seconds is way too long. So it depends on the child you're working with before they need a prompt. Then I'm going to go ahead and point, and here I'm gonna point to the giraffe, just to give him a little help, because he's having difficulty with the giraffe, but I'm giving them the opportunity to participate.
Giraffe.
Giraffe.
So when I pointed, that was demonstrating. That's the letter D. They did not respond, so I pointed to demonstrate that it was over there. This is the demonstration prompt. Now I wanna expand on that. I just don't wanna leave it on the giraffe. I wanna give him a little extra. So this is that plus one, if we look at the zone of proximal development as said by Vygotsky, and I might wanna say that the giraffe is tall, right?
So I'm gonna go ahead, and I'm going to go into tall,. Then I can say he's tall. So I'm gonna go ahead.
Tall.
Tall giraffe. Too tall. And then we can, we can make something... Too tall. So I just wanted to expand. That is the letter E in model.
We're getting to the end. We have model, M. Model is when I get them to the channel. I said, okay, animals, and then the next thing I, I showed them is zoo, and then I gave them the options. This is a step one, day one. And then they found the giraffe, and if they didn't, I gave them the opportunity to find the giraffe.
If they didn't find the giraffe before I lost them in frustration, it's that challenge point, then I give them a cue. I might point to where the giraffe is. Then they go ahead and press the giraffe, and then there's that letter E. I'm gonna expand on it, and expanding on it, I'm gonna add that it's tall.
I'm gonna go and add that it's tall. So I could say anything for the giraffe that I wanted to say about the giraffe, but I wanted to talk about how it's tall.
Then, after that, we have L. L is like. So for like, we're just gonna make a comment. We're not getting anything. We're not answering fact questions.
We're sharing our opinions. We're sharing our ideas. I love the giraffe. So maybe I'm gonna wanna say that I love the giraffe. I love giraffes. That's my favorite animal. So I'm gonna go ahead and just make a comment. And then I can ask them if they like the giraffe.
You like.
Do you like the giraffe?
This L is just, I say, I call it like, and that's just when we're talking about our opinions. Do you like it? Do you not like it? Is it... You can make some comments whether this book is fun. Maybe I wanna say that this book is awesome, so I might say awesome. So I go into my exclamations, that, that comment where we're just, or I might wanna laugh and say, "Ha ha."
This is the social language. We're just commenting on the book, or we're commenting on the experience and the activity. That's the L. So there we have the M-O-D-E-L that I showed you that you would use in the context of a storybook. Now, because I like to go multi-sensory, multimodal, and I work with children with autism who are minimally speaking, I like the language to be in print and in pictures.
So when I am doing this with my SIS membership, I am also going to have, a sign. This is things we're sending back to the zoo. We need to send the giraffe back to the zoo 'cause he's too tall. This is the task-oriented movement activity. So here I have also the picture of the giraffe and the word written in bold print.
I'm gonna hook that onto the sentence strip, and we're also gonna print reference and read it. This is not something that the child has to do. This is something the child gets to do. The children love reading the sentence strip, and this is where speech tends to develop. They're tapping on the syllables as spoken.
Look at the giraffe. So they have the giraffe. That's what I do after the high-tech AAC. It is frosting on the cake. It's nothing the child has to do. It's something the child enjoys that's part of the routine. And then I have the 3D giraffe as well. So this is what I'm talking about: universal design for learning.
When you're te- when you're learning something, you're learning it through multiple modes. We're learning it in print, we're learning it in pictures, we're learning it in real objects, we're learning it in movement, we're learning it in the book, in the context of the book reading experience. We're hearing the word here on the device, as it's speech-generated device, which the research is promising for improving speech outcomes with children with autism that are minimally speaking.
And we have it in the symbol here, and we have the word here once again. The more ways we can communicate language to the child, and the more ways the child can express language, the better the outcomes for all children. So this is just best practice. Universal design for learning, thinking about how we can present concepts in a multimodal manner, how the child can express themselves in a multimodal manner, so the learning can happen at a quicker pace, more efficiently, and the children are gonna remember what they learned.
In my SIS membership, they're gonna go through an obstacle course, and they're going to go ahead and put the giraffe back in the crate, 'cause he needs to be sent back to the zoo. And then he's gonna take the toy giraffe here, and he's gonna put him in the zoo box and drop him in as well.
Then they're gonna come back in my SIS membership, and they will check a checklist to make sure that the job is done, thereby also improving executive function. So that's what a task-oriented movement activity looks like, and that's what we do in our SIS membership every week. We combine them with books and songs, and we learn in a multimodal manner.
The AAC device, that's part of it. Every time we turn the page, we're gonna turn to the next page, and we rinse and repeat. Here, they sent me a... oh, my goodness. A lion. Roar. You know, you can act out the lion. And he was too fierce. I sent him back.
Once again, when we go through the model in lion, the M, that's where I'm gonna give the completion prompt. That's where I'm going to start them off, and I'm gonna get them on the channel. And then later on, I'm not gonna do the completion prompt. I'm gonna back up. So the first thing I would do is I might go to the animals, and then now they're gonna pick the zoo.
And then after they pick the zoo, they're gonna do the next step, and they're gonna pick the lion. Then we're gonna go back a step here, and the next time, you know, over time, they're gonna pick the three-step process. They're gonna go and do the animals, then they're gonna do the zoo, and then they're gonna pick the lion.
It might seem old-fashioned, this backward chaining method, but it is effective, and there's research to support it. What we're doing is the hardest part. Starting is the hardest part. But over time, you can step back, and the child's going to be independent. When it comes to model, the letter M, that's on the beginning.
We're gonna give them that completion prompt. We're gonna get them to the channel, and then after that, they're gonna g- find their own way to the channel. Remember the O, giving them the opportunity, the opportunity for them to independently find the symbol. Later on, that O would be the opportunity for them to independently find animals, the opportunity for them to indep- independently find the zoo, the opportunity then for them to independently find the lion Then after that we have the D, demonstrate.
If they're not responding, and every child's gonna be different, in a certain amount of time and you're losing the child, they're starting to lose interest or become distracted, we wanna keep them in the game, we're gonna demonstrate. Might provide a pointing prompt of where that animal category is so they can get to that page. Then after that we have the E. How can we expand upon it? Where's that plus one? So if it's lion, maybe I wanna say that it makes me feel it's scary, so I'm gonna go and, and I'm going to go to this device and I'm gonna describe that the lion makes me s- feel scared.
So I'll go to the feelings page, and then I'll ask them, "How does the lion make you feel?" And then I might say, "Whoa, he makes me feel nervous. The lion, I'm nervous when the lions are around." So we're expanding upon it. Then we're gonna say that, and then we're going to go to our feelings. So then later on it's the like.
So how are we gonna do that? We might say that I like the lion, or I don't like the lion. So you can just say, I don't like it. I don't like it. I don't like it, or I do like it. So we can just talk about our feelings. It's all part of that, and that's... And if you just keep that in mind right from the get-go, using the device to say that something's awesome, something's cool, that you don't like something, that something's scary, something's fun, and just modeling that right from the get-go, that range of communicating functions, you're really gonna provide a nice foundation as their motor planning improves, that they're not just going to use this as a requesting device So that is the stages.
So every time that you turn the page in this really, really fun book, and they lift the flap, and they find the new zoo animal, there's a process that's gonna occur, and that's when the process is going through the model. And the model is, okay, what am I gonna show them? Letter M, what am I gonna show them?
The letter O, what is their opportunity? Step back, don't cue them. Give them the opportunity to independently use the device. D, how am I gonna demonstrate it to them by cueing, what kind of prompting am I gonna use? E, what's that plus one? What is that little something that I'm gonna add to the word lion, to add to that experience?
Am I gonna say it's my lion, your lion, the, the lion's roaring? What is that one concept I wanna add to the word lion? And then the L, just commenting. Commenting on the activity, commenting on the book, commenting on anything at all. This is the social language piece. That is the five-step process, and you don't go through M-O-D-E-L every time you turn a page.
It's going to depend on the situation. Maybe the child doesn't need any modeling, so don't model. Maybe the child doesn't need any demonstration or any prompting, so don't do any demonstrating. Just step back. Maybe there's no reason to expand on something so you're not expanding.
It gives you some, some support, something I can pull out and I can use on a situational basis in my toolbox. That said, I want you to do what you do best, which is to roll up your sleeves and make the world a better place.
One more thing. I need your help. I'm currently researching AAC implementation. I'm gonna use that information to improve our AAC materials, so I really need your input. And when you complete this AAC survey, and it's not easy, it's comprehensive, it's gonna take 15 to 20 minutes, I have a big thank you for your time.
And that thank you is something that took hundreds of hours to put together for you. It's going to be in Arabic, Spanish, and in English, and what you're going to receive is an AAC goal bank. You're also gonna receive an AAC training that you can share with parents or professionals, a link to that, and that's going to be in Arabic subtitles, Spanish subtitles, and in English.
And lastly, I have a frequently asked questions about high-tech AAC parent handout, and that is in English, Arabic, and in Spanish. So I have a whole AAC implementation toolkit that you are gonna receive immediately when you complete this survey. So I am asking a lot out of you. I need to know about your experiences with high-tech AAC devices.
You just need to have one child that you've worked with over this past year that uses a device such as this and that has an AAC app on it. It doesn't have to be a high-tech device. It can just be a tablet that has an AAC app on it. If that's you, I really need your input. You could be a parent or a professional.
I need your experience from your back porch. So like I said, look in the show notes for that link to that survey. When you complete the survey, you're gonna immediately receive in your inbox three things. One, you're gonna receive the AAC goal bank, 64 goals for high-tech AAC that you can use with your kiddos, that you can modify for your back porch.
Second, you're gonna receive an AAC training on how to use the model approach with st- with storybooks. The training is ready to share with parents, fellow professionals. It's only 20 minutes long, so it gives everyone what they need to know in plain English. Third, you're going to receive frequently asked questions that parents have that addresses parents' most common concerns about high-tech AAC.
All of this is in three languages. It's in English, it's in Spanish, and it's in Arabic. So you have your handouts in English, Arabic, and Spanish, your goals in English, Arabic, and Spanish, and your video is in Arabic, and Spanish subtitles. I want you to have those materials right at your fingertips to share with parents and colleagues.
Do what you do best and work with me on this. Give me some information about your experience using high-tech AAC. Together we are better.
Yeah. She's Brian shell. She'll get, yeah, she's Brian. She.
