I am some what mesmerized by the process that needs to be in place to set up a child with a assisstive communicative device. I can only think how many students in my own small school that could benefit from a device particularly the I pod. In our everyday work at school we see so many students who struggle with language, reading and writing and we are sometimes stumped as to how to help them reach their full potential. Listening to Barb tell us the success stories from her school board it is obvious that they have a good system for evaluating students and training them and their support system. I wonder how many students are seen in a year and how many would be on a wait list to be seen.
In the HRSB I know we do have AT specialists but I am not sure how they service the school population. It would be interesting to find out the model that they use. We do have one student who has a communication device that she got this year. The only downfall is that it stays at school and she doesn't benefit from being able to use it at home or over the summer.
In my previous employment I worked at a developmental centre with special needs preschoolers and I was fortunate to do a 3 day AT workshop. This was probably about 12-13 years ago and it is amazing how some of the same equipment that we are talking about now was used back then to some degree. It has obviously advanced but the concepts were there. At our centre we had many children with physical and mental disabilities ranging from visual impairment, cerebral palsy, downe syndrome and developmental delays. Because we were dealing with very young children we mainly used cause and effect switches and some simple communication boards with 1-3 cells. We did also have some experience with intellikeys at a very simple level.
Now that I think of it we had a little boy (he would be in his 20's now) who had cerebral palsy and was in an electric chair. He used board maker and we used to make grids up for different aspects of his day. for example we would have one for the sand box, circle time, meal time and so on. He was able to point but it was somewhat of a slow process as he did not have great control over his fine skills. he also has some speech but to a stranger he would be very difficult to understand. His speech was also very slow. Eventually he went off to school and unfortunately I am not sure what his communication system was after that. It does make you think how technology has changed and how well he would do with one of these devices. I am not sure the Ipod touch would work for him due to his movement but I think an Ipad would be great since it is bigger. I am looking forward to finishing our project tomorrow and seeing how the different groups have designed their cells to suit the student.
For our system we decided to look at the social aspect while Sally learns to use the system. We did school so while designing we looked at all the different social situations she may be in during school time so that she would be able to communicate her wants and needs and to also communicate with her peers. I know it can go many ways so I look forward to seeing how others were thinking and where they thought to begin.
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