There is a wealth of information and materials for you on our website, so you may be asking yourself, "Where in the world do I start?" No worries, we've got you! This is the first stop in your training! In this unit we will be answering some primary questions to get you started!
Our specialized training hub dedicated to supporting communication success in Early Intervention in the home and our preschool classrooms
AAC Partner Strategy Kits are engaging posters/handouts, descriptions and short videos explaining and modeling techniques for you to use to help your student be willing, and able to communicate using their AAC system!
5 steps to move from training to talking, give you a clear path for you and your student learner. Learning to communicate is a shared journey between the learner and their partners, and that makes sense! Communication is a shared activity between two people. It is the means for us to make connections, meet our needs, engage socially, participate in shared experiences, and bridge the gap between our experiences and sharing these their partners.
The TASP is available from Tobii Dynavox for $299.
Tobii explains the TASP in this video.
This video is a 15 minute video explaining the administration of the TASP and curated from YouTube.
The Communication Sampling and Analysis program, available on-line, which allows us to gather a communication sample for students who are non-speaking or minimally speaking, in a systematic way, and analyze it.
The Dynamic AAC Goals Grid (DAGG), is an AAC assessment and planning tool which is the result of a collaborative effort between Vicki Clarke, and the team at Tobii Dynavox. Holly Schneider and Vicki began this project with the goal of giving professionals and families, supporting students using AAC to communicate, an organized system of assessing their student’s current communication skills and determining goals to move them in a positive direction along a continuum of developing communication skills and competence. The DAGG has been through several iterations and continues to be studied and improved, even now, almost 15 years after it was initially introduced. Our agreement was that the DAGG would always be made freely available to anyone who needed it, and despite the improvements, the basic foundations are still there, and that is what we are discussing in this training. For our school teams, the DAGG gives us a means of evaluating an individual student's communicative competency and a means to move them toward independent communication skills.
This iPad application was developed to give you some starting information about your student's skills, language comprehension and access as it relates to the use of augmentative and alternative communication tools. We created a short slide show to get you started!
The Dynamic AAC Communication Assessment is a DTA Original tool to help guide you in assessing your student’s skills in communicating using features in different AAC systems. It is an observation guide to use as you are working with your student during typical communication situations.
The Test of Aided-Communication Symbol Performance (TASP) is a formal assessment tool you can use to assess some of your student's skills which may impact your selection, development and instruction in AAC. This tool was developed by Joan Bruno. We've done multiple trainings on the TASP and will upload these soon. For now, take a look at the curated videos from YouTube as a place to get started!
In this lesson we are considering the cognitive demands of using an AAC system to communicate and the considerations you will need to make to support your student, depending on the complexity of your topic!