Category Archives: Augmentative and Alternative Communication

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AGOSCI 2017 Presentations

May 18, 20172 Comments

Today I went to one of my very happy places – an AGOSCI conference. I love AGOSCI. The Australian AAC Community is so inclusive and supportive – and extremely clever! The AGOSCI 2017 conference was fabulous as always – and I’m just sorry that for the first time in 25 years I’m not attending the whole

Literacy for All: An introduction to balanced literacy

Nov 13, 20162 Comments

Upcoming Adelaide Workshop 27th of January, 2017 8:30am to 3:30pm Adelaide West Special Education Centre 12 Moldavia Walk Taperoo SA 5017 Workshop Description Including the diverse range of students in special education settings in a literacy program can be extremely challenging. This presentation will outline a balanced literacy approach that can be used with ALL students to actively intervene

Getting Hands-On with PODD thanks to Interactive Speech Pathology

Sep 23, 20168 Comments

This week I have been at the wonderful Joondalup Education Support Centre in Perth, Western Australia. They have a number of students using AAC systems, including a few who have started recently with Pragmatically Organised Dynamic Display (PODD) books. One of my favourite resources to share with people who are beginning to use PODD is

ISAAC Pre-Conference Workshop: What’s Up in Apple Apps?

Aug 7, 20169 Comments

Today was the first day of pre-conference workshops at the ISAAC 2016 Conference in Toronto, Canada. I love the ISAAC Conference – and being a part of the fabulous world AAC Community – so it was a very exciting day for me. First up this morning, I attended a workshop by Carole Zangari from PrAACtical

AAC and my Mum

Jul 23, 201639 Comments

My mother has Alzheimers. She has had it for several years but this year she has deteriorated rapidly. She has developed complex communication needs as this has happened. She struggles to find words and often can’t finish a sentence as she forgets where her sentence is going. She can no longer tell all the funny

Let’s Communicate: Plenary presentation at #QASELcon16

Jun 3, 20164 Comments

This morning I was honoured and delighted to give a plenary presentation at the Queensland Association of Special Education Leaders (QASEL) 2016 conference. The presentation was on Augmentative and Alternative Communication – aimed at dispelling some myths and discussing good practice. I was lucky enough to have students and teachers from Claremont Special School and

Do’s and Don’ts of AAC: Pulling It All Together

Dec 9, 20152 Comments

In May this year we (David Niemeijer and Jane Farrall) teamed up for a presentation at the AGOSCI 2015 Conference on the Do’s and Don’ts of Implementing Real Communication Through AAC. We strongly believe that every single one of us has a right to communicate. Overall, we recognize that communication: occurs all day, every day,

My Favourite AAC Posts Of All Time

Oct 30, 20158 Comments

As we are nearly at the end of AAC Awareness Month I thought I would write a post about my favourite AAC blog posts of all time. I couldn’t decide on a most or a least favourite – so there are no numbers. Just a list in no particular order. I hope you enjoy these

Why We Do Aided Language Stimulation – And You Should Too!

Oct 27, 20155 Comments

Note from Jane: I can’t thank Mary-Louise Bertram enough for writing this fabulous guest post! I saw her put this explanation on Facebook and begged her to turn it into a blog post – which she did. Mary-Louise is a fabulous AAC person, very knowledgeable and skilled. She is one of my favourite people to

AAC: Don’t Demand Prerequisite Skills

Oct 24, 201517 Comments

In May this year David Niemeijer from AssistiveWare and I did a presentation at the AGOSCI Conference on the Do’s and Don’ts of Implementing Real Communication Through AAC. We created a poster to accompany that blog post – and this is one of the follow ups to the poster. In the last few weeks I