Episode 163: AAC After Work: Digital Storytelling to Foster Communication Partner Skills - Part 2

In part II of their AAC After Work presentation, Rachel and Chris do a deeper dive into storytelling with digital tools, aka digital storytelling. They go over all the different ways that digital tools can support storytelling and how we can use storytelling as a way to stimulate communication, support literacy, and teach core words! They also discuss “pre-story brainstorming” where you discuss the setting, characters, and problem/solution with an AAC user before you begin to create the story. 

Before part 2, Chris shares about an eye gaze user who he was asked to help support as part of a school team.  Previously, the parent was programming a unique page of vocabulary for every story the AAC user was going to read so the user could participate by answering questions. There was also a limited number of icons on each page of the user's screen. Chris shares about how he worked with the family to increase the number of symbols/vocabulary on the screen after they discovered the student was able to target icons really well. He then discusses changes they made to the implantation strategy (e.g. descriptive teaching) so the student didn’t need a newly programmed vocabulary page all the time .

Key digital tools discussed this week:

🔑 http://www.mystoryapp.org - allows students to create stories with pictures, stickers, describing words, and more. 

🔑 Character generators (heroforge.com, peanutizeme.com, bitmoji.com) let you make a visual representation of a character, including things like what the character looks like, their emotions, outfit, pose, etc. You can then take a screenshot of the character and put that into a storytelling app. 

🔑 storyboardthat.com - allows you to create comic-like storyboards.

🔑 picmonkey.com - drag words, icons, and more on top of digital images.

🔑 thinglink.com - create a story around a single image by adding hyperlinks to the image.

🔑 Edpuzzle.com - search for any youtube video and it allows you to add prompts/questions. Send videos to families for carry over practice - you can tell the family what to model as they are watching the video. 

🔑 Loom.com - screen record or take a video of yourself that you can share with others, including ideas and feedback for communication partners.