Submitted by: Bailey Englot
Getting an iPad to use as a model of adaptive communication has been a gift to our classroom. I have two students who communicate at least partially with the help of the application Proloquo2Go on iPads. It has been incredible watching them navigate this way of conversing and witnessing how quickly they adapt to new vocabulary and new situations with the use of their devices. After attending a presentation with Lindsey Sharpe, our Speech and Language Pathologist from the Clinical Services team, I learned there was more that could be done to support their growth in communication than simply giving extra wait time while they respond in conversation. Lindsey’s suggestion was to find a way to access an iPad specifically for staff to use so that, just as we are always modelling verbal language for students, we can also model how to compose thoughts and questions with adaptive technology.
In my classroom, we have been talking a lot about what it would be like to have to communicate exclusively without our “mouth words” and how much communication is lost when you have to take longer to compose even the most basic of sentences or phrases. These significant empathy-building conversations are largely guided by the book our class is doing as our classroom read-aloud, Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper. I highly recommend this book for anyone who has a classroom that includes a student with communication needs, or anyone who would like to gain a deeper understanding of the gift of communication and what it is like for those who rely on adaptive communication tools such as an app like Proloquo2Go.
In addition to reading this book as a read-aloud as a class, my students and I will also participate in a Communication Challenge in the coming months where we each create our own vocabulary boards on file folders and for one hour we cannot use our mouth words – only words that we can point to on our vocabulary boards and other forms of communication. This is enormously powerful in terms of building empathy for how difficult it is to have a thought in our minds that we just can’t adequately communicate to another because of the limited words we have available. This year, we will be using the iPad as an additional tool to explore and try. When we do this challenge, it is amazing to see our students who rely heavily on their communication devices on a daily basis become the leaders in the classroom because they’ve had the most experience communicating in this way. If you would like more information on how I do the Communication Challenge in our classroom please email me at
bailey.englot@lrsd.net.
I have much to learn still about how to support my students with complex communication needs, and how to continue to bring empathy and understanding to the other students but having this tool available to my staff and I feels like a very positive next step.
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