By David Chapple, PRC Ambassador Kate and David I moved to Austin from Cleveland in April of 2012 to be with my then fiancé Kate. My best friend Mike drove me and my two dogs in a big moving truck across the country with my van being towed behind. Mike said it was like driving a tank with a white elephant pulling us fr...

By Sallyanne McShane A big part of my journey with Willow has been communication. I starting signing with Willow when she was nine months old, but it didn’t seem to be sinking in. I got nothing back from her, nothing at all. I remember writing back when she was two, that “woohoo!” She signed ‘biscuit’. So we ju...

By Jane Odom, M.Ed, Director or Implementation Resources Wordle is a tool for generating “word clouds’ from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts and colors. Plug in your AAC device ...

By Jane Odom, M.Ed, Director of Implementation Resources Shout Out It is important to give our AAC device users enough time to practice their vocabulary in a meaningful way. One way to teach core vocabulary with repetition in a group is to do a ‘Shout Out’ activity. In this activity, you will need to create a poste...

By Jane Odom, M.Ed, Director or Implementation Resources Think about how often a young mother will talk to her infant even though the infant cannot repeat what she says. In this same way, it is important for us to use some techniques to show a child what we expect. First and foremost, it is important that the person tea...

I feel mad Emoticons are symbols used to convey emotional content. You can use these with your AAC device user to play a simple game that helps them learn to express their feelings with their device. Draw simple faces expressing different emotions (or find some art online) Glue the emoticons onto poker chips or cards...