AAC Awareness Month

This month is AAC awareness month. For those of you who might not be familiar with AAC, it stands for Augmentative and Alternative Communication. AAC includes any form of communication that is not oral speech (gestures, facial expressions, use of communication devices, pictures, etc).  In honor of AAC awareness month, I thought I'd share some of my experience with AAC and some things I have learned along the way.

Over the last couple years, I have learned a lot about AAC use from my students and colleagues. Currently, I have four students who are nonverbal. Three of these students use a device, similar to a tablet, to communicate. They are each at different levels of communication. Since so many of my students need AAC devices, we do some activities as an entire class using an app on our classroom iPads. It has been fun to see all my students benefitting from this form of communication.

Contrary to popular belief, the use of an AAC device does not impede learning to speak. Actually, research demonstrates that those using AAC devices, often begin speaking more. I have seen this clearly with one of my students. In the last year, his verbal speech has increased significantly as his use of an AAC device has also increased. Today he even said the word "communicator" to describe his device. Both his speech pathologist and I were surprised. It's fun to actually experience what I have been told research shows. As a result, I have learned that the earlier a person can start on an AAC device, the better, as vocabulary is likely to continue to increase with age.

A couple weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend (as well as present) at the second annual Indiana AAC Summit.  I have implemented a lot of high tech AAC in my classroom. However, I really didn't have a lot of low tech options for students. After returning from the conference, I printed off some boards that match the home screen of the devices my students use. I also printed off some symbols and words (matching the buttons on their AAC devices) for specific things that students might need to be able to communicate in the hallways.

We have one student who has struggled with indicating the need to use the restroom. His device has been broken since the beginning of school, so we have been using an iPad for his communication. However, he usually doesn't take it with him when he leaves the classroom.  Up until my printing of the boards and cards, he would wander around the room or get upset when needing to use the restroom.  We would take him to the bathroom every couple hours to prevent an accident. This often caused frustration because he would have to sit in the bathroom even though he didn't need to use it at that time. The day I printed the cards, he walked over to one of my aides during specials, grabbed the bathroom card and tapped it ... the same way he taps the icon on his communicator. We have only had one accident since printing these cards and that was when we forgot to carry our cards with us. He also flipped through the cards at one point and indicated "all done" and walked to the classroom door.

We are going to have some larger boards printed with the home page of their AAC devices on them. We plan to hang these in places around the school where our students often spend time (buss pick-up, cafeteria, gym, hallway). This will help in two ways. One, our students will have ways to communicate even without their devices (although they should always carry them). Two, other students will become aware of what AAC is and how it is used by our students.

Some helpful etiquette for communicating with someone with AAC:
-be patient, it takes longer to communicate this way
-only predict what they are saying if they give you permission to predict
-don't assume someone who uses AAC has cognitive disabilities
-do not touch or take their AAC from them without permission