Social Communication: Incorporating Communication Devices

I think there's kind of a three part system here. One is that you have to be comfortable with the device or system. When babies are born and come into this world they don't come into the world talking, they listen and watch someone model communication to them for about a year before we see them communicating in a way that can be considered normative language, right. The same thing is probably true for most of our students, they need to see someone consistently modeling their device to them so that they can learn student's device and kind of be proficient at it so that you can model it for them as often as possible like as often as possible you should be using it all the time. The second part is to make sure that we are including the device in activities that are academic and part of the lesson and also in activities and lessons that are not part of general academics right? Most of us do communication at school to to communicate socially right And that's where we are most motivated to communicate. We wanna talk to our peers. We wanna talk to friends. We wanna talk to even the teacher sometimes. So as you're building your lessons really look to how you can incorporate social communication as part of your instruction. Can you take a second where students partner with their elbow partner and talk? Can you take a second where students are communicating with the person sitting across from them to brainstorm an idea or an answer? We need to incorporate more opportunities to communicate socially as part of our lesson in order for our students to really be motivated to use it. So think about how you can include more communication. And then the last thing is that we have to give the device power and that doesn't mean that you charge it, which of course you should be charging it. But what that really means is that when a student is using their device, we have to acknowledge it, and if possible praise the use of it so that our students are more motivated to use it more, right. We talk about integrating the device into our lessons. If your verbal students are communicating as part of the lesson then they've been validated to give that communication. If your nonverbal students haven't been validated, if they try to use their communication system and they don't feel heard or it doesn't get a same kind of response that a verbal student gets, they become discouraged right? So I we wanna make sure that the students devices have power and that they are validated, that we respond to them, that we acknowledge them, that we reply to them as part of a student using it including during the lesson. So look for opportunities as much as you can to incorporate it, make sure it's part of everything that you do, give it power, and make sure that you have mastered the device so that you can model it for your students.