Today we continued looking at
Prologuo2Go. We spent a good part of the day setting up an account
for an imaginary student. Only by going through that exercise did I
realize how hard a job it is! There are so many questions that need
to be answered. Our student was good with three-step directions, so
we tried to keep our screens no more than three deep.
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| Proloquo2Go |
Right from the beginning, questions
arise—how to set up the home page? Should we create a set for each
milieu (our choice), or should our home page comprise
sentence-starters, or topics?
Since our student had “some” fine
motor/visual discrimination issues, we decided to go for the middle
ground with text and icon size, and voice speed. The larger the
visuals, or course, the fewer choices on one screen. So you'd better
pick questions that are pretty darned specific.
I realized during that presentations
that we had done a pretty good job in our group with needs, wants and
questions, but we needed to think more deeply about interactions. How
do we promote two-communication of a social nature? How can we use
tools like Proloquo to support relationships?
In some ways the exercise would be
easier with a real student. Once you got started, you could fine-tune
the choices. (Wouldn't it be great if there was a stats function that
recorded how many times a user used each button?) The whole process
can be rather time consuming, and requires a commitment to followup
so that the user's communication stays current, fresh and frequent.
I'm impressed by the symbols in
Proloquo. It's amazing how well they express their meaning,
especially the verbs, adjectives and adverbs, which are not so easy
to get across in pictures. That said, I think that using real photos
whenever possible would facilitate communication and
individualization. As long as you take good pictures! (We chose
“Bridges” for our student's science project because he could see
it to take a picture; but no zoom on the iPad! Our bridge was really,
really far away.)
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| What the MacKay Bridge really looks like |
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