Shane's Notebook

Augmentive Communication Technology @ Home

Nathaniel has had the benefit of having tech savvy parents, and a few good Autism resource school teachers, unafraid to turn him loose on a computer. To date, he still loves surfing PBSkids.org and his personal YouTube channel, unassisted. I am so proud of him. His Autistic cousin, Trinity also loves to logon to Google and do web searches all day for her favorite television shows, like PowerPuff Girls.

Up until last Sunday, however, I was not sure how his reading was progressing. It is so difficult to know what skills are developing and what information is being retained because he cannot talk to you. Without his voluntary speech, there is no expression of the learning…until you pay attention to what he does. He types!

Nathaniel spells "disneypixar" and "nickelodeon" on his Dynavox.

This is the Dynavox. A very expensive Augmentive Communication Device. Although I believe an Apple iPad would do the job better. Below, you will see Sophia. She is Nathaniel’s little sister. While she is not affected by Autism or other learning disorders, she enjoys playing with PECS symbols – a primary communication tool for the majority of Autistic children. Visual recognition of shapes, patterns and images is the foundation of cognitive [language] development.

Sophie plays with Nathaniel's picture symbol library.

I saw the coolest thing in my son’s autism resource classroom today. His teacher had a YouTube video of a dance routine playing so all the kids could imitate and follow along. She had it projected onto the whiteboard using a laptop and video projector. It was “The Cupid Shuffle”. It was so neat to see all the kids do the steps! I grabbed Nathaniel’s hand and did it with him once. The teacher kept it on a loop until she decided to change videos. She tried to do a search of the “cha cha slide”, but was not able to bring it up. Apparently, she lost her internet connection and the fun was over for the afternoon… (I think one of the kids stepped on the network cable ). In any case, it was great to see technology being used this way in the classroom.