Episode 293: McKinzee Steve, Danielle Welge, & Kendra Everette (Part 2): Providing High-Tech AAC as a Tier 2 Early Childhood Intervention

This week, we share Part 2 of Chris’s interview with McKinzee Steve, Danielle (Dani) Welge, and Kendra Everette, three members of the AAC Team for a large school district in Texas! In the second half of this interview, they talk about interactive trainings they have created for their district; ideas for getting admin support for AAC programs, and their new project, a series of tier 2 supports for their self-contained early childhood special ed classrooms that includes AAC apps and iPads for every student and teacher!

Before the interview, Chris shares a fantastic AI tool that will determine what the overall consensus view on a particular research question - consensus.app. It’s an AI search engine for research that allows you to ask a question and it will provide the academic field’s consensus siting research on that topic. This can be great resource for AAC myth busting!

Key ideas this week:

🔑 If you are creating an AAC newsletter, consider turning it into a blog post! This can make looking at previous newsletters more interesting, and is also a great way to catalog previous articles in a searchable way!

🔑 The Texas AAC team has “collaboration tickets” for their SLPs where they go out to campuses and help the SLPs there build their skills. Their focus is on empowering the SLP to implement while the AAC team acts in a supportive role.

🔑 Even though are AAC apps and iPads for every student in their self-contained early childhood classrooms, if a student looks like they are utilizing the AAC supports more often, that is a flag for the teacher and SLP to consider sending the student home with a dedicated device.

Links from this episode:

Consensus.app https://consensus.app/ , an AI search engine for research

Continuum of Language Expression (COLE), a systematic tool for educators to assess language development that Chris helped develop! bit.ly/colegooglesheets

Transcript of the Episode

Please Note: This transcript was generated using speech recognition & AI tools; it may contain some grammatical and/or spelling errors.

00:00:08
Welcome to Talking With Tech. I'm your host Rachel Madel, joined as always by Chris Bugaj. Hey, Chris.

00:00:13
Hey, Rachel. How's it going?

00:00:15
It's good.

00:00:16
All right, Rachel, I've got a tool to show you today. Let's talk about this problem first. Something that kind of. Keeps cropping up in my neck of the woods. I'm sure it happens in your neck of the woods too.

00:00:26
Is the idea of not evidence based? We've talked about that so many times on the podcast. But just that one aspect of evidence based is what's research based. And people often might read one or two articles and sort of choose what they want to, you know, just selectively choose research that sort of fits their own narrative, yeah. So it's hard to necessarily find what's the consensus around a particular question or topic when you're only presented with a handful of research.

00:01:03
I found an application called Consensus dot App and if you wouldn't mind, would you mind opening up a window and typing it in now? If you are a Patreon supporter, you've already seen this. We have, we posted this in Patreon a couple months ago I think, but essentially what it does. Is it's a website that that is free. I'm sure there's premium versions.

00:01:26
I haven't really gone that deep into it yet. But yeah, there we go. And you have it up on your on your screen. You just share the screen with me. So it says it's an AI search engine for research and what it's at there's right at the top there's a place for you to type in some sort of research question right now.

00:01:42
Something that we hear in the world of AAC all the time is what research can you provide? To support the notion that or to help a parent understand that AAC will not hinder verbal speech. In fact, it'll help promote it. Is that fair?

00:01:59
Do you get asked that question all the time, all the time, Chris?

00:02:03
Right. And we can send them. Here's on one article, here's another article. I could send you a list of ten articles that they're not going to read because they have lives and it's often written in a very. Non non friendly jargony way.

00:02:17
You know what I mean? It's heavy language for someone who has studied Speech language pathology, let alone someone who has not studied speech language Pathology. But what if we were to type it into this AI search engine? For instance, what if you were to type in there, Rachel? Does implementation of Augmentative Alternative Communication support speech development?

00:02:39
So here you are. Pretend you're a parent. You're not sure. You have maybe concerns that this might hinder. So you type this in my speech therapist saying it's it's this is actually going to support speech language development, AAC.

00:02:51
What this does is it it Combs through the research out there and it gives you, hence the name consensus, a consensus of what the research says about a particular topic. And so at the very top, it gives you a little summary. And then it gives you different articles that support that that summary. So would you mind reading the summary out loud, Rachel?

00:03:13
OK, so it says. Top four papers analyzed. These studies suggest that the implementation of Augmentative Alternative Communication supports speech and language development, particularly in children with autism spectrum disorders and those with speech and language disorders.

00:03:27
There you go.

00:03:28
So in case you're somehow you're having some doubts or you just want to hear it from another another source and just you don't, you're nervous that the person has sent you something and they have, you know, selectively chosen what research to send you you. This is another way that you could kind of either share like. So don't take it from me. Here's a question that you can post and and post it into this app. Also, I think you could what happens now, Rachel is at the top in the URL, there's a link and you can grab that link just like you grab the grab the link from any other website, like up there in the URL.

00:04:05
And you could send somebody that link which which then sends them to to the same results that you're getting, you know? Or you could just say here, go to this website and type it in yourself, ask, ask it how you'd like to ask it and see. See what it says.

00:04:19
I love this Chris. I'm so excited that you shared this and it just feels like such a great easy way to just get a snapshot and then also to find the research. I can't tell you how many times I've gone down rabbit holes of hours and hours of combing through and making sure that I use specific words and then still not exactly feeling like I've found what I'm looking for. So I feel like I could totally see myself using this and I think it's like a great, great tool for, you know, parents. And like you said, we're always kind of trying to, we always get questions, Chris, people e-mail us all the time and direct messages on, you know, social media and say like I have this problem and then they go in detail the problem and they're like, do you have any research that supports fill in the blank.

00:05:10
So this feels, like, awesome.

00:05:11
I I think there's another application for it too, besides like sharing information or giving someone another way play way to to. To get to the research, I feel it's a great way to check your own biases. Like all right, here's something I believe, let me type it in here is this sort of the consensus of the research and maybe even ask it because it's an AI tool. It's not perfect, just like any other AI tool. It's a or like any other tool you know it's going to be based on how you use it.

00:05:37
Maybe you ask the question that you're trying to solve 3 different ways and see how the what the consensus is and if it's not fitting what you have in your mind. Then maybe it's time to open your mind. Like maybe what I was thinking about this is not actually right. Maybe it's wrong. Maybe I should be questioning my own beliefs and my own biases, and this tool can help you do that.

00:06:00
The other thing I love about this, Chris, is that it does link to the actual studies and it gives a snapshot. But it also looks like you can dive deeper of course with the the citation that you have. And so I love that too, because I feel like it's so hard to stay on top of the research. And it's like I'm seeing, you know, a citation from 2022 and 2023 and I'm like, this is new. Like I haven't seen this yet.

00:06:24
So that also feels like a nice way to kind of make sure that you're up to date in our specific niche area of AAC. I love that.

00:06:35
So once again, the name of this app or the way to get to it is consensus dot app. And again, we're not sponsored by them. We don't know them at all. It's just a handy AI, you know, playing around with AI. It's one of the the tools that we came across and thought, this is interesting, this could be useful.

00:06:51
Plugged in a couple questions, found it actually useful and found it as a time saver and thought. Got to share it on the podcast. Well, got to share it on Patreon first and then share it with the rest of the world.

00:07:01
Chris, before we head into the interview, I have to ask, 'cause I feel like a lot of people are probably wondering this. And I'm also wondering, how do you stay on top of all these new tools?

00:07:10
Yeah, great. Great question. Well, it's the same way of staying on top of anything. The first thing is my professional learning network, right? So there are people that are interested in the same things I'm interested in.

00:07:22
We're constantly sharing new articles we found either just simple emails or teams. Like for my school district, we use teams. Microsoft Teams, so just think of professional learning network in the same way that you use Instagram or X or anything like that. So that's the number one way and then besides that, it's. Podcast and and doing my own, you know, flipping through Google searches, meaning I go to the Google app and that's one of my scrolls.

00:07:54
You can see my doing my thumb here. Rachel, right. I scroll through the Google app, which is now curated stuff, knowing that there's the stuff that I'm interested. I'm interested in AI stuff, so it gives me all sorts of AI articles. So those are I think some of the ways.

00:08:05
Again, nothing new or profound, I think. Stuff that people have been doing for for a long time.

00:08:11
Yeah. I think that I do kind of something similar. Just trying to make sure that I feel, you know, like I'm on top of things. But it also kind of happens naturally when you're following the right types of people that are sharing other resources. And I feel like there's lots of different ways that you can stay in the know.

00:08:26
But I'm super grateful for you always keeping me in the know because often times you know things before I know things. And so I feel like I'm some of the first to know.

00:08:35
Well, I will say that goes both ways. It's just that there's might be certain topics that in my Google feed or in my personal learning network that come up more frequently for me and and for you there's other things. And so we are. This is why we're such a great team. I feel is that we share cross, cross back and forth.

00:08:54
There's other topics that I know come up more frequently for you and you're like have you heard of X? Have you? What do you think about Y? And then we have a conversation about it, 'cause then I got to go learn about that in the same way that. This consensus app.

00:09:07
This time it came from me. But there are plenty of times where it comes from you.

00:09:11
I love it. I love it. Chris, what's our interview today?

00:09:13
Well, this is the exciting Part 2 of the conversation I had with the educators in Texas who are doing all sorts of innovative things around implementing AAC and propagating awareness and training and just helping the to implement AAC across their entire school district. District. Hey Rachel, guess what?

00:09:46
We're headed back to ATIA.

00:09:49
We've been doing this now for a couple years and it's always super fun time. It's a great experience and so this is a whole what, a whole day together doing a Pre conference.

00:09:58
I love our Pre conference, Chris. It's just like such an amazing group every single year and every single year it's totally different. I feel like it's never the same day twice and just full of tons of fun activities and lots of engaging conversations. And by the end of it, we're all like BFFS and it's so much fun.

00:10:18
So if you're interested in attending, check us out at atia.org, find the pre conference link, find us & up and we'll see you there.

00:10:35
OK, Let me ask Mackenzie I we we heard about the caregiver programs. We heard about the AAC book club. What else?

00:10:47
Yeah. So the bulk of what I am holding now and I'm so thankful for these two people because I used to hold all of it and it was impossible. So this is actually, we're just so excited. This is a great time to be having this conversation because we're doing a lot more. So what I'm holding on to are really two main projects.

00:11:09
One is our professional learning series and the other one is our we call, we're calling it project tackle Tiered Access to Communication and Literacy. So I'll start with the professional development. What that is, is we have a course sequence. It's eight courses, 8/2 hour courses designed for speech therapist, Occupational therapist, and then our. Teachers of students with visual parents and teachers of students who are deaf and hard of hearing and then also physical therapists.

00:11:42
So any of our like sort of related service providers are eligible to take these courses. And in our district we have a professional learning requirement of I don't know how many hours it is. I always get way too many because I get very excited. 12 OK 12 hours of. Yeah, that makes sense because it's 12 hours of content.

00:12:03
So we have 12 hours required of annual professional learning. So we host these trainings once a month live and then we live stream them to zoom for anyone who wants to attend and learn on the job. And we also record them and upload them to our like Canvas platform. It's like our learning internal learning platform thing. And what it is, is an AAC leader series.

00:12:29
And now this is like a title that I just made-up. And so anyone who completes all 12 hours is a designated AAC leader. And some people, like, care about the designation. But most people really, once they go to the first two, they're like, oh, this is cool, and I just actually want to keep learning about this. So our course sequence covers things like intervention like AAC 101 fundamentals and then we go over like feature matching, assessment set, framework type stuff.

00:12:58
And then we go through there's two days of literacy, there's a caregiver education one, there's a teacher collaboration and collaborative models of service delivery lecture. And then there is one on culturally responsive and neurodiversity affirming AAC. So that's I I think I'm, did I miss any. Oh, and goal writing? There's a bunch of them.

00:13:20
So there's a lot of courses that we're offering. And so anyone who completes all of them can become an AAC leader. And that's sort of just the first step. You know, these people take these courses and then they practice the skill and then they have the opportunity to talk to us and like we can kind of all work together if something's not working. So they're saying, I tried, you know, to do shared reading with this kid, but he just won't sit for it.

00:13:42
And so we'll. And sort of get with that SLP and troubleshoot like, OK, can we find a book on Tar Heel Reader about Elmo, if that's their favorite thing in the world? Let's try starting there and then sort of just working together throughout that. So we have this structured lecture series, but then we also have what we call collaboration tickets, where a speech therapist can reach out to us via a Google Form and we'll get an e-mail notification. And then we can either go to the campus and support them face to face with a kid or do it on Zoom or whatever, just to sort of help them build their clinical skills in AAC implementation with the whole idea being that we're not the ones doing it, we are there to support them.

00:14:28
And I see. Danny, you want to add something?

00:14:30
I wanted to make sure that so one thing about the professional learning opportunities that. McKenzie has worked hard to get in. Our district is all of them are eligible for our state licensure hours for a speech therapist, which is really motivating for them. So a lot of them have attended these trainings because they're getting again credit for it. So I just wanted to mention that because that is a really like motivating piece and I think McKenzie, you've worked hard to be able to get that.

00:15:03
Yeah.

00:15:04
Right. And then so it's sort of like a one stop shop. You know, you can get your district requirements, you can get your licensure requirements. There's an ethics one too. So there's a lot.

00:15:14
So let me just make sure I'm understand correctly. So they you you offer this each of these a number of times throughout the school year. They sign up, they come to an in person experience for an hour around this, but you're did you say you're recording them and putting them there up online in your learning management system? Again, for you it's canvas, but for someone else that could be Schoology or Google Classroom or whatever you're using right? Is that right?

00:15:40
Am I getting that right?

00:15:42
Yeah, exactly. So we're presenting them live and live streaming them on Zoom. There are definitely benefits to attending live because it's very interactive and we want people to be participating and like generating their own ideas. The, you know, if they do it later, we have a tool called Playposit that we use where we can put in like little questions. So the video will pause and we'll have to like.

00:16:03
Type and answer or or really use some sort of cognitive engagement with the material and like think about it before the video resumes. So that's sort of how we imitate that, but it's not. I like the live sessions way better.

00:16:17
Well for sure I think what I'm really hearing you as you're modeling, you're attempting to model universal design for learning. So you know some people have the barrier that I can't either make it to the time or in person's not going to work for me because the state comes up so an async. Synchronous experience works for me. So I want to do that and and some people are like, no, I need to be in person and I think it probably shifts where somebody does watch the Zoom recording and do the Play Posit which is kind of like I think Ed Puzzle's another. I mentioned the other tools that people might have in their neck of the woods.

00:16:50
So we have Ed puzzle that's just like Play Posit where I can pause videos and make it interactive. Point being, some people might change. Oh man, look how much fun they were having. I'm watching this video. Look at all this stuff I'm missing out on.

00:17:02
I got to be at the next one they'd offer this live. Is that? Is that all fair?

00:17:07
Yeah, And we bribe them with coffee and Donuts to come live. So yeah.

00:17:12
Right, right.

00:17:13
Yeah, I think the point. I think the point is trying to make it as easy as possible for people to attend and as accessible as possible. So if you want to attend and you want to learn about AAC. Here it is, you know.

00:17:27
Right. You're eliminating excuses, right? I can't. I really can't say. I couldn't be there in person because I can do it this way.

00:17:33
Or this was the Tiberi. Well, I could do it this way. So there's always options for people to choose from. Awesome. Awesome.

00:17:39
Is there any anything else about that particular program you want to tell us about?

00:17:44
I I just really, I think that that it it started from just like a a monthly newsletter when I was first starting this job I just wrote a newsletter and then people are like this is awesome. Like we people really want the information. They just when they're serving a caseload of I don't know 60 students and they maybe have you know two or three AAC users on their caseload. They don't necessarily. Know where to start or how to get.

00:18:11
So I think just giving them somewhere that's like very clear this is where you can start. I'm. I think it's just really important to say that like people want to know people want to know this information they want the courses they wanted. The newsletters I didn't know they want. Now they don't like the newsletters as much because they want the courses.

00:18:29
But like it's we still do them because we want everyone to have content available to them in a way that's easy for them to consume and then we try to record it. So that we don't have to do it over and over again.

00:18:41
Awesome, awesome. OK, some quick technical question. What are you using for your newsletter?

00:18:47
Google Docs. We just make a Google Doc. It's very pretty. We have a little template that we fill in and we make a It's just a Google Doc, and then we send it to our e-mail list with all of our speech therapists so that they can read it.

00:19:01
Well, something that we're doing in our neck of the woods, so. For you to consider right is we've turned our newsletters into blogs so that people can go back and search them later, and we can tag them and organize them by categories. Oh, I want to see all the literacy stuff? Click. And it's here's all the newsletters.

00:19:19
Newsletters. Here's all the blog posts on that have literacy components. Oh, but here's something on least the most prompting. Like Kendra was talking about, right? OK, boom.

00:19:30
I click on that. Like so it it helps us. 10 How many things do we have? We don't have anything that we haven't done anything for a while, at least most probably. We should probably add that because we could see how many tags we have so and it collects data.

00:19:43
How many people are listening to or you know how many people have clicked on the blog you know so consider that it might be an option for you to say and people can subscribe so you how you know how many subscribers you have. It might be a. It might be something to consider, but it might also be. Why not? We're good with our newsletter, Chris.

00:19:58
You know, people like it.

00:19:59
What are you using for your blogs? Like what? Yeah.

00:20:03
Our school district has purchased Edu blogs or uses Edu blogs, and so we just used that tool, right? But if your school district is not using a particular blogging system, the world's your oyster, you know.

00:20:20
We do the our we do have like a website. That just a Google site that we use and we do upload like previous newsletters to our website so people can kind of refer back. But I like this blog idea. It's it sounds cooler than just uploading it too, so I.

00:20:39
Like the I like the. Sorry, Kendra, what were you saying? I said. I'm making notes. Oh, good.

00:20:48
I I like the idea of them. Being able to search by the tags, because right now it's like I have to remember what month because it says July or we wouldn't have one in July, but you know what I mean? Then the end of the month and then they just have to remember what month it's in.

00:21:02
So that's that's a really good thing we should look into and then they can search it. I think they can search it in Google too, depending you know, on what level of access they have, like if they have access to the entire folder of all the newsletters, the search would probably be the same. But that's another benefit we see is like, you know, I can search for things that I want. And actually, I don't know how much they use it so much as I use it. When someone emails me and they're like, oh, I need an article on bubble.

00:21:26
I'm like, oh, let me go, oh, here it is, pulled it right up on the blog. And then I shoot the blog to them, which maybe is a gateway for them to learn more stuff from the blog, you know?

00:21:35
That is such a good idea. That was a really good idea.

00:21:40
The only way any of these sorts of ideas work is if you have administrator support. So it sounded like at the beginning you're like we have these Rockstar administrators that are really supportive. Can you talk a little bit about that?

00:21:52
Yes. So this is something that was new for the AT team at all. There wasn't an AAC team. A few years ago, like it was just there was an AT team with an SLP who was helping them out. And that person who preceded me was incredible.

00:22:11
She was very, very strong SLP, but she did not have the level of administrative support that we have. So when I started this job, it was really at sort of a transitional time period and our boss at the time. Was just trying to manage things and keep things afloat. And she was like, yeah, do whatever you think is best. And so I had like some some creative freedom there.

00:22:35
So let's start there. But anything that's like going to actually be affecting, like real systems change in a district requires that we get all of those people. Who are the primary decision makers who do the money stuff? That I don't understand. Like all of those people need to be involved.

00:22:57
So our district is really organized in sort of a vertical structure where we have a speech supervisor and then she has a director of related services and inclusion, and then she has a director of special education above her. And it's just this very vertical sort of chain. And so in order to get administrative support, I really had to step back and take all the information that I was learning from all the different mediums when I was first starting and just analyze how can I fit this into this district's structure. So the first thing I did was identified their priorities. And so often times we would get like emails about this is what we're working on.

00:23:40
Our school district is pushing for all of these things. And then I tried to find common ground. So the three things that I really sort of laser focused on were equity, literacy and then compliance and so. As with many school districts, there was sort of an imbalance of who had assistive technology, high tech assistive technology based on who their parents were. And so that was a a data point that I could easily pull up and demonstrate to them and talk them through and like hey, equity is a priority for you.

00:24:15
Here's a solution is switching from this expert model to. I wait until I get a phone call and then I go out and assess someone to. I'm going to train all the speech therapists at the district level to be providing similar. Identification patterns across the district regardless of things like socio, economic status. So that was a huge thing.

00:24:36
Our district's been very transparent about it's push for equity over the recent years and that's something I'm very proud of when I think about where we work. And then the other thing is they have a huge push for literacy. And then, so I sent out a survey to all of our high school speech therapists and I. You know, was like, how many of your AAC users know most of the letters most of the time engage actively during shared reading, all of the things that you're looking for to determine if someone is at an emergent or conventional literacy level. And the results of that survey were pretty jarring.

00:25:11
So I was able to take that data point and say, hey, all means all, like, let's think about all of the kids, right? So we we we don't want to be graduating. AC users as non readers when they we can do better than that. Totally. So that was another data point that I had And then compliance, right, they just pulled all the relevant laws and I was like, here's what IDEA says and here the Office of Special Education Policy has this letter and I was putting it all into a PowerPoint.

00:25:44
And so then from there, the big focus was like, hey. I know you care about this and I care about this too, and let's problem solve together from there. It was really just about relationship building and like kind of really building a solid mutual respect between the work on the ground that we were doing and the work in the office that they were doing because we all like. Getting to know those people and what their priorities are was super important. And also they're just like really great people.

00:26:19
Like no one go, I love educators. Like no one goes into education to get rich. You know what I mean? Like they're all just like really good people. And so just taking the time to get to know them and then their professional priorities and aligning our goals with their priorities was sort of what got us in.

00:26:37
So then we were able to shift from that expert model really to doing all of these robust capacity building. Projects that we've been talking about.

00:26:46
Well, OK, so going to robust capacity building before we go to the last thing you, I heard you say that you are starting this upcoming school year with an MTSS model. I I have to ask the question people might be wondering, Oh my goodness, they've done a lot of work. They've got this training materials, they've got the book club structure of six weeks. They've got caregiver support structures. What are you willing or have have the ability to share that we can put on the on the show notes for people to say, oh, I don't have to start from scratch, I can follow this.

00:27:23
I can either just use their stuff or I can follow it as a as a model.

00:27:28
We, I don't have it prepared. We do have a handout from we did a presentation at ATIA and at the Inclusive Classrooms conference and at the Texas Technology Access Program Conference all about. Our policies and procedures. So we do have a supplemental handout that's like kind of goes through the steps that we took for each of our capacity building projects that we could probably share. I just would have to probably modify it.

00:27:53
It would take a little bit of time but I I think you guys would feel comfortable sharing that. I see head nods. I just want to make sure before I say because it's a it's really a creative Co creative effort. We've all made everything.

00:28:05
Yeah, I think we we just can look at it together and figure out what we want to include and absolutely.

00:28:10
And if people want to hear more from us, they can come to Asha in November where we'll be speaking.

00:28:17
Yeah, absolutely.

00:28:19
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Someone said let's, can you do this at Asha? And we were like, OK, we'll do. Sure, why not?

00:28:25
So Pendra and I will be there. Danny, unfortunately can't be.

00:28:30
Well, I'll be there too, so I'll make sure I'll see. I'll make up for you, Danny.

00:28:34
Thank you, Chris.

00:28:35
Sorry, I'll miss you there.

00:28:36
I'm honored that you are taking the thought.

00:28:39
So let's talk about multi tier system support. What's coming up? What's going on? Where are you going with this?

00:28:45
Yeah, so this is a very long conversation, so please stop me if I'm getting too. I get very excited about this, so please stop me if I'm too excited. This idea was actually inspired by your work on the specific language system first approach. It does look a little bit different than what you've described, but it's very, very, very similar. So basically.

00:29:09
What we are we're approved to do is we are approved to find a Tier 2 support for our students who are in self-contained early childhood special education classrooms. So essentially we are we have we already have a Tier 1 support which is you know paper and pencil or like light tech core boards available to everyone printable. Anyone who wants them can use them. We have a District 1 to 1 device initiative and in our early childhood special education classrooms, those students have iPads. And so as part of this project that Tier 2 support would make, excuse me, a high tech speech generating app available on all of those one to one iPads and one for the teacher.

00:30:01
And then of course, we have a very robust Tier 3. Feature matching, You know here all your options here, all the features set framework, all the stuff that you have a million episodes on that I won't go into. We have a very robust Tier 3 request process. But that Tier 2 support is really what's new. And this idea is the idea is that we're creating a language rich environment and that I think this is your quote, but accessibility drives design.

00:30:32
Or maybe that's something that you just say a lot. That's someone else's quote. I don't know. I heard it from you. So the idea is students will have access to it, Teachers will be modeling.

00:30:44
Language and grammatical structures in collaboration with the campus based speech therapist during instructional time centers and small group shared reading activities. So the whole idea is that students can sort of self select. So those students who are really. Using that technology a lot. That's what we may consider, oh, this might be a good thing to write into that IEP for the student because they're really using it a lot to participate in and engage with the content in the class.

00:31:17
So yesterday we had our very first training for our early childhood teachers, and so that actually went really, really well. They're all very excited by it, and it was sort of the same reaction that we get whenever. I bring an AAC device into a classroom for like Tier 3 support. Right as I'm showing the teacher, I'm walking them through the features and we're talking about different strategies that they can use. And they're like, oh, this is great, can I just use this to model for everyone?

00:31:47
And we're like, yes, but don't take it away from them. But like, yes you can. You can model the language in a visual way for everyone. And so the idea is that the teachers will be educated on strategies, including access modeling. Core vocabulary, communication opportunities, and then shared reading, predictable chart writing and independent writing.

00:32:10
So they'll get all of those. We we've wrote a whole book. It's not really a book. We compiled a bunch of resources from other people who wrote really great resources that are available for free. For those teachers on each of those strategies, and then we're doing a phased training approach.

00:32:25
So phase one is to train the teachers on just the basics. What is the tool? Let them get some hands on practice. Let them ask questions really going through common AAC myths and realities. You know, this is not going to impede speech development.

00:32:40
Here's how you, you know, produce different grammatical markers on this device, and here's how that aligns with the Texas Pre Kindergarten Standards and all of the stuff that. That that they already know. We're just showing them how to embed that tool into their pre-existing routines and then our phase two training will happen in two weeks next week and I'm not really sure and that's gonna be all of the speech therapists who work with those teachers. It's gonna be sort of a train the trainers thing. So those speech therapists sort of already know the basics.

00:33:10
So it's really gonna be getting into like, how can we do a collaborative model? How can we you guys just run a book club basically without us, How can you guys? Really support this teacher in using this tool so it doesn't get abandoned. And then the phase three training will be on our that will be like 30 minute modules that they can do one at a time. So 10 minute video, 10 minute activity, 10 minute discussion basically.

00:33:35
So it's a series of modules that they can do to sort of prepare their class. So the first one is like Access, right? So this is what Access is. All right, here's a checklist of things like do I? Your activity might be, I have, you know, a printed core board on everyone's desk and I have the three iPads, one at the centers, one over here and one by my smart board and I can project it on there.

00:34:01
And then the discussion might just be like how did it go this week, like what what was hard. And then they want that we would encourage the speech therapist to kind of talk through those barriers with them. And so that's like a very, very, very fast. Overview of what this project is, so please ask questions if I missed anything.

00:34:22
Let me just ask 11 clarifying question is you said that they have a 1 to 1 device that's a district thing. So the kids are getting iPads already. There's are the kids are apps going on those iPads or are they going on other iPads? And are the teachers getting Class A classroom iPads? Help me help me, maybe I missed it.

00:34:46
Yes. So the Tier 2 support, those apps will go on the 1:00 to 1:00 iPads. Now if a student is and the and we show them all how to use guided access and stuff so that they're not going to YouTube in the middle of reading time. But if a student is really using it, that's what we taught the teachers. That's a flag.

00:35:09
Say, hey, this kid needs a dedicated device and then we would bring them a separate one so that student, then that device can go home and they can, you know. Do all of the things and then to answer your follow your other question about teachers.

00:35:22
Yes, we purchased modeling apps for each of the teachers to have for the class Gotcha. So it's one iPad per teacher. Those are the sort of you calling them, the modeling iPads.

00:35:33
Yes. And then all of the kids have a 1:00 to 1:00 and they can. With them like one at this center, one at that. They don't. In the early childhood, they're not really using them for a lot of instructional stuff because it's play.

00:35:45
They're learning through play. So the idea is like during that playtime, those iPads are there for communication and they can use them or they don't have to.

00:35:54
Got it? OK. And then how many teachers are we talking about? Like, roughly? There are 80 teachers.

00:36:00
Whoa. OK, so that's not a small amount of teachers. No, it's not like, well, we're doing it with five teachers and we're going to see how it goes. It's like we're going in eighty teachers. We're doing it.

00:36:10
Yeah.

00:36:11
Yeah. So the the idea was originally to do it at pilot campuses. We do have data from a select few campuses that just so happened that almost every kid in there had a Tier 3 AAC device over the past two years, and. How what we saw in those classrooms was that those kids as like, you know, maybe there's ten kids in a class and six of them have a Tier 3 AC device. What we saw is those other four, I can do math, those other four kids were also benefiting from that visual instruction for sure.

00:36:49
So we saw that a lot.

00:36:50
So let me ask you this, places that have attempted this have often gone from two different standpoints. One is we we, we collected the numbers and we found this is the app we use most frequently in our neck of the woods. Other places have said, well it's kind of a Washington, we use all sorts of different apps. So they do a they gather stakeholders and they choose what is going to be the the Tier 2 intervention. And I'm just curious, how did you approach it?

00:37:19
Yeah. So we were more so in the. On the side of we have every single system under the sun in our district. We approached it like very systematically. Actually, after we talked to you at Atia, we like had a really systematic approach that we, Danny and I went back to the hotel room and we're like, we're gonna do this, this, this, this and this, and we're gonna ask all these questions.

00:37:46
So we had focus groups of speech therapists and then we met with our AT. Supervisor, our speech therapy supervisor and then our Director of related services and inclusion and we all sat down. We did pros, cons, We listed out all of the features that we thought could benefit all of the students and then we tried to find a tool that would support the most students because there is no one-size-fits-all. And we kept saying that over and over and over at our training, like if, if this tool is not. It please don't give up on that student like we will use a different tool but what we were looking for is we really wanted a system that was they couldn't choose a bunch of different grid sizes and the settings were not too yeah because we didn't want a bunch of different kids having like you know this is a Tier 2 support so it's we wanted to be a little bit more uniform.

00:38:44
And we wanted a tool that allowed for a robust vocabulary, a lot of grammatical markers, access to the entire alphabet, and something that could allow students to participate in a variety of communication functions. So then the other piece was we wanted to pick a system that sort of had an emphasis on motor planning, just because. The navigation demands we've seen with a lot of our young ones are kind of high for some of the apps. So we were just kind of going through and showing our bosses, you know, this is how you form a simple sentence on each of these systems. This is how many hits it takes to say the word dinosaur in each of these systems.

00:39:23
This is how. Like, yes, maybe this one looks hard at first for Teachers, but once they get used to it, it sort of becomes automatic. So we sat there and we had our bosses play with it. We showed them videos comparing and contrasting these things. Kendra made a really cool like feature comparison slide deck that we went through and then we landed on our tool.

00:39:47
And I'm excited. I'm excited about it.

00:39:49
I don't know, Mackenzie. This is like listening to or watching the $25,000 pyramid. Like we just described the whole thing. But I'm not saying the word, just letting everyone listening to kind of guess what the word is, you know, like. But clearly you're talking about lamp words for life.

00:40:05
That's what you landed on.

00:40:07
Yeah, yeah, that is. And we've tried to be device agnostic. Like we really, truly believe that students can learn whatever we teach them. But we did that. We pulled your mass feature matching handout.

00:40:18
We looked at that. You had made a lot of really great points on there. So we showed that to our bosses and we like kind of really went through everything all together and Lamport for Life sort of checked the most boxes.

00:40:31
I think one of the activities that we did with our bosses that. Kind of resonated with them was we had them create like pretty long sentences with we were looking between Provo, Quo and LAMP. And so we had them kind of create these longer sentences on both and just seeing like how many hits it took. And that's something Chris that you mentioned at ATIA to us to try out. So thank you for that.

00:40:58
But that was kind of eye opening to them and it kind of showed like some of the benefits of LAMP.

00:41:05
So to be fair, you probably showed them pro quo to go, is that right?

00:41:10
Yes, pro quo go. We have to clarify now because we've been calling it pro quo, but now there's actually.

00:41:17
Yeah. Well, and again, I know how you're saying we went to be sort of we are talking with tech tries to be device agnostic as well. And there's certainly been other school districts that we've talked to that have had come up with a different tool based on whatever's. Their parameters were so yeah, so I but I'd love for your thought process and how much time you took in putting into it as opposed to just some sort of knee jerk reaction like I don't know, this thing or threw a dart at the wall. Do you know, it's really well thought out and you brought in a lot of stakeholders.

00:41:54
Yeah. And I think the thing that resonated also when we were explaining the rationale for the project to the teachers yesterday was we we pulled those Texas pre-K standards. And we're like mapping on this is how you can, like, model these different standards that we're supposed to be giving to our students. It's very vague. It says things like grammatical, increased grammatical complexity.

00:42:17
And so we were talking to them about like, you know, you're already modelling increased grammatical complexity with your speech, but providing that visual model can help our learners learn through different, you know.

00:42:30
Exactly. 1 is is anyone opposed to visuals? Can you raise my hand? No, no. No one's raising their hands.

00:42:35
OK, great. Here's a great way to do visuals to do that. Yeah. Perfect. Perfect.

00:42:40
All right. So I I have just a couple of follow up questions if that's OK. So you mentioned this sort of Tier 3 system, meaning OK, we know it's not working for this kid or we we're suspecting it's not going to work for this kid. We need you. It sounds like you have a system in place for that and that's probably a system you've already been using when people are.

00:43:00
Is that fair with the book club since you've been doing that with the caregiver program and with? The support program that you did for speech therapist and the paraprofessional teachers, right. Everything we've talked about. Do you have any outcomes that are specific to students, like we saw language grow from here to here, or how are you measuring actual student impact? Or if you haven't, how are you planning or?

00:43:29
Oh, Chris, we didn't even think of that.

00:43:32
Danny, you want to take this one because you have, I think you have the answer.

00:43:36
I have the answer. Well, I have the answer for what we're doing for project. Tackle we Yeah. So for our MTSS program, we found a tool that I think you created, Chris, with a group of people online. And I'm glad you brought this up because we were going to ask you about it, which we can do in a second.

00:43:59
But we found a tool online that kind of had. It's really, really nice. It has some data points to collect. And so our plan with Project Tackle is for us to go into the classrooms, observe and take some data on student outcomes and then also the primary communication partner outcomes. So hopefully by next year or at the end of this school year, we'll have some some data to share.

00:44:25
Love it? What? What's the tool?

00:44:28
The coal.

00:44:29
The coal. Yeah. The continuum of language expression, Yeah, that's when we. Yeah, that is something I helped develop. Sorry.

00:44:34
OK, I we've I found it on. I think one of your episodes are online or something and you had it up there, so I figured it was OK to Oh yeah, just making sure.

00:44:47
I was like we should probably ask him before we just.

00:44:50
Like, OK, awesome. Yeah. We we've kind of looked at that and we may kind of tweak some things that that are specific to our project and to our school district. But that's kind of the the base of our data collection for project tackle.

00:45:07
Yeah. And I will say that like until this year it was really hard for us to keep track of student outcome data. We've that was really has been on the speech therapists and part of their job. But now that there are three of us we were able to sort of divide the campuses and so we'll be working with individual speech therapists and kind of tracking that data ourselves too. So we can have a a bigger idea of the the macro level change rather than that micro individual student change.

00:45:36
So we're working on formulating like you know we do nine week cycles like a check in for each kid every nine weeks just to see you know just a quick little where they at, what's what's going well, do you need help type of data collection point.

00:45:53
I will say we do have some data on like the number of AC users in our district from when Mackenzie started to now and I think.

00:46:03
I can see what is the number, it's it was it was 115% increase in AAC users in our school district. Yeah, by capacity building. And I can't take credit for that, right? I I pose the idea, but then the speech therapist, these teachers, these parents, like none of this would exist if there wasn't an appetite for it, right? These people all want the information and they really like they'd love it.

00:46:31
And they love seeing their learners like, make progress and like just the the little things that make our days. Like we have a whole little bookmarked folder of when people send us like, anecdotal information. So we're hoping to really have some more quantitative data. But we do have lots of qualitative stories from parents and teachers and Tasmania and sometimes even the AAC users themselves. I'm thinking of some of our friends in high school, but yeah, it's it's just been really great to see sort of the cultural shift happening.

00:47:06
Oh, this just like makes me swell inside. Like my my heart has got like the Grinch grows 3 sizes this conversation. Like because it's like how much language is growing because of all the efforts of all the people. That said, like we can make this culture happen in our district with a concerted effort. With that said, what's got you, you know, what's next for you?

00:47:26
What are you curious about? What are you interested in? What's kind of?

00:47:30
You know.

00:47:31
It's at the time of this recording. It's summer. What are you? What are you following and like clicking on? And what are you reading about, learning about and experiencing what's?

00:47:40
What's got you jazzed? How about Kendra? You want to go first?

00:47:44
OK, well really what's got me jazzed is learning the most about CBI and AC and really the feature matching process for AC in the different phases of CBI. So that's been my personal summer read is the CBI book by Doctor Roman Lancy.

00:48:06
I have a prediction. I'm going to stay here now on the podcast. Right now, most AAC systems start with a white background and then you got to go find a dark background or death. And I just have a feeling that somewhere down the line within the next. Three to five years, but we'll see how AI effects things.

00:48:23
But the default setting will be a black background with white text, because who would it, It would help more people to do it that way. So why isn't that the default setting? So interesting, Interesting. That's what you're there. So that prediction here, you heard it here first.

00:48:37
We can go back and see, oh, and that the default setting changes. Or maybe I'm completely wrong. So we'll see.

00:48:43
I don't think you're wrong because I automatically do that just for myself, you know? It's easier for me, so I'm sure it's easier for more people. So I bet you're right.

00:48:54
What about you, Danny? What are you interested in?

00:48:58
I am interested in a lot of things, but I would say I'm most excited we just got a grant for a 3D printer. So I am super excited to kind of work with our OT. She's going to lead the project, but kind of learn more about that. We've learned how to make a key guard on like a 3D printer, but we're going to be able to expand that to help some of our students. So just kind of diving in into that so.

00:49:26
Fun. That's so fun. Making stuff on 3D printing is so much fun. There's so much you can do with that. All the great stuff that you can throw into literacy kits, right that you can.

00:49:34
Oh, here's this book. What can we make that can go in there? Awesome stuff. And getting kids involved to bake stuff in there is going to is going to be great. OK and Mackenzie, what about you?

00:49:43
What are you thinking about?

00:49:46
My summer reading has really been focused around UDL. So we've been like all of this conversation on our MTSS project has sparked a huge motivation and me to collaborate with our academic AT team and help them sort of implement similar things at on their level. So we're doing you know education for our diagnosticians and school psychologists and we're like really trying to get more people on board with AT not just AAC but AT for everyone across the district. And so we're hoping that our team can sort of holistically shift from this like assistive technology specialist, I put that in air quotes. You can't see it if you're just listening, but assistive technology specialist idea to more of this like environmental engineering, inclusive design, all of that kind of stuff.

00:50:48
So that's what I've been like, really interested in.

00:50:51
Again, that makes me smile, so you can see it on the smile on my face. If you ever come to a presentation, I do my job title is assistive technology specialist, but I say I think of myself as an inclusive design facilitator. That's really what we're trying to do. So you're the the thought that you're trying to bring people together and change the system that way. It's really exciting to me.

00:51:12
So good luck. Good luck. Fuck, I think it's it's all of this stuff. Sounds really exciting and I can't wait to see where it goes. Any final thoughts?

00:51:23
No, I don't think so. Thank you for having us. Oh my God, this has been really awesome.

00:51:28
We could, we could talk about this all day, so it's exciting for us.

00:51:32
Which you will, which you will at Asha so thank.

00:51:38
You.

00:51:39
All right. Well, thank you so much for being on the Talking With Tech podcast and we'll talk to you next time.

00:51:44
Thank you for having us.