Programming and Personalization

Information on how to program your child's device can usually be found on the program's website. If you need help, you can always talk to your school's speech-language pathologist. 

Things To Remember

1. It is important to have your child's device available and ready to use at all times. It is their voice! Remembering to charge the device and keeping it out and nearby is critical. 

2. If the device is not available (e.g., you are at the swimming pool), then ensure that a low-tech replacement, such as a core board, is available for use instead. 

3. Give your child time to process and respond using their device - this could be 10 seconds to a few minutes depending on the child. 

4. Allow your child some time to explore the device (e.g., "babble" by pressing the buttons) on their own.

5. Respond to all your child's attempts to communicate with the device, even if you believe the message to be incorrect. This teaches the student that they have POWER in their world by communicating with their AAC system.

6. Allow for different modes of communication. For example, if your child can verbally say "hi" or waves hello, you do not need to have them find the word on their AAC system. 

7. Don’t move vocabulary/icons around on the device if you can help it. Moving vocabulary around can make it very difficult and frustrating to learn the language of the AAC system. 

Core Vocabulary

Core vocabulary is a small set of words that is used in most situations. Though we have thousands of words in the English language, research has shown that up to 85% of what we say every day is made up of only 250-350 words.

Most devices have core vocabulary on the very first page. They may be slightly different from device to device.

Why is Core Vocabulary Important to Teach?

Making Core Vocabulary a priority for teaching opens the doors to so much more communication than any other set of vocabulary. For example, “turn” is a word in core vocabulary. Using this word, you can say:

• Turn the corner

• My turn/ your turn

• Turn off

• Turn on 

• Turn up

• Turn down

• Turn over

• Turn around

Examples of Core Boards

Teaching Strategies

Prompting

A child cannot just "learn" to speak using their device without support, just like a child who is learning to speak verbally. Prompts will help a child learn new routines, such as using their device to communicate. As he or she becomes more independent with using their device, less and less support is needed. The goal should be for the child to no longer need prompts to do what is expected of them. We use a hierarchy to help us understand how we can use prompting to reach this goal.

Modeling

The best way to teach your child how to use their device to communicate it to use the device yourself. Just like how children learn to speak by listening to the speakers around them. To ensure that you have the skills to model using your child's device, make sure you:

1. Take time to learn the vocabulary of the device, especially core vocabulary.

2. Allow others, such as grandparents, caregivers, and siblings, to use the device to try to communicate. Doing this will help "normalize" the device within your family. 

3. Embrace mistakes that you make when using the device. This will demonstrate to your child that it is okay to make mistakes when communicating and will allow you an opportunity to teach them where to look for the correct word at the same time. 

4. Talk through the process when looking for a word with the student (i.e. “I want to talk about ___, so I am going to try and find ____ on this page.”

Expand

The best way to model is to meet the student where they are at and add to it. For example: