Today was the first day of the 2025 AGOSCI National Conference. This is our Australian AAC focused conference – and a “must-attend” event in my calendar.
Yesterday was pre-conference workshop day. I was lucky enough to attend Erin Sheldon‘s workshop on vocabulary instruction. Erin talked us through some great resources, materials and ideas around vocabulary instruction – and we got to practice doing some parts of this in Proloquo. I love it when I go to a session that challenges my thinking and supports me to implement new language and literacy supports – and this session did that. I can’t wait to put it in practice!!
Today was then the first official conference day. This year the conference is in Adelaide (my home town) and the opening ceremony started this morning with a fabulous Welcome to Country by the father of one of the students I am lucky enough to work with, Petiola Wilson. He and his daughter are both proud members of the Kaurna people.
What was significant about this, was that this Welcome to Country was done by someone who has lived experience with AAC. Petiola spoke about his daughter’s journey from communicating informally, to communicating with Proloquo2Go and then developing lots of speech. This is a beautiful example of AAC supporting speech development, just as the research into AAC tells us it does. These days she mostly communicates with speech, but, when needed, she is a part-time AAC user with the newer app, Proloquo.
Straight after the Opening Ceremony (and after morning tea), I presented my first session for the conference with the wonderful Nick Drover. Nick is Assistant Principal at Springvale Park SDS and is a great advocate for AAC and for Literacy for All.
As promised to those in the session, I am sharing most of the presentation for today. You can find it below!
I also got to attend some great sessions through the day. My personal favourites were the three presentations that Emma Grace did on the evidence base for PODD! The information she collected around this will hopefully be published at some stage – and I am very excited to see that happen!!
I’ll be sharing my presentations from Day 2 of #AGOSCI2025 very soon – and if you are attending the conference then I hope you are enjoying it as much as I always do!
Kathy Schumacher
Jane