WEBINAR? SAY WHAT? School in my Jammies!

I was a webinaring machine on Saturday or in my head I felt I was. Saturday did not exactly happen the way I had hoped it would! My husband owns a snowremoval company so he was unavailable to take my crazy, energetic 3 year old away from the house for the webinar and my "Nana babysitter" was storm stayed! So we made the best of the webinar experience. Between letting my crazy golden out because she had some "poop issues" wrestling my nudist 3 year old dynamo from the kitchen table, I did actually do a little webinaring!
I was really excited by the whole process of webinaring from my home in my Pj's! The ease of entering the webinar and learning was fabulous. The way Barb was able to hand over the controls of the webinar so people could communicate was awesome! My only wish from the whole experience would have been that I could have located my ear buds or speakers so I could hear better, these Toshiba's supplied by the board have very low volume level! The webinar experience I had just proves where learning is going as technology becomes more sophisticated.,

Communication For All!

Everyone has the right to be able to effectively communicate with those around them, but so many students are isolated and not able to communicate, this is something I myself take for granted daily. This causes fustration, anger and in some cases rage. Proloquo2go is an amazing program and learning about it made me want to run back to school and yell "why isn't everyone doing this". We have several children at our school who in my opinion should have access to this program. I think it's been a matter of teachers just not knowing where to start along with there not being enough hours in the day. (many students are using Pecs) When I had a dicussion with another teacher about how excited I was about this program she asked if I could help her with this! She has the technology at her finger tips she's needs support!

When we were told at the beginning of class, here are the two case studies chose one and develop a Prologu2go system for him/her, you have 5 hours.  We are figured piece of cake, this will be done in no time. However, the further we got into the program development the  quicker the realisation came that this wasn't as easy as we had originally felt it would be. We quickly learned this is a well thoughtout,  highly important task that is very time consuming. Parental involvement and input would be extremely helpful in this process as they know their child's needs best.

We first planned using paper and sketched each layer then we started inputting and rearranging the icons and layers to best suit the needs of our student. It really is an ongoing process and every potential communication needs to be planned for the student, things from speech speed, people who will be commincated with, language needs, physical abilities, visual abilities etc. The task quickly became overwheleming. As a parent I know that this process would not all happen at once, it would happen before big events, outings etc. It would be a cummulative ongoing and evoling process!

Even though the task of desiging a prologu2go program seemed overwhelming, it was not because of the system itself it was the planning and layering of all the speech to best meet the needs of the studen. The program itself is so easy to use and really quite incredible. The ability to plan, design and use this augmentive device solely and to not have to print,copy,cut,paste and laminate a pecs program is incredible. It is such a time saver and ultimately so much easier for the students who use this program. Finally they have an voice! It really is a game changer!