McKinzee Steve, Danielle Welge, & Kendra Everette (Part 2): Providing High-Tech AAC as a Tier 2 Early Childhood Intervention

This week, we share Part 2 of Chris’s interview with McKinzee Steve, Danielle (Dani) Welge, and Kendra Everette, three members of the AAC Team for a large school district in Texas! In the second half of this interview, they talk about interactive trainings they have created for their district; ideas for getting admin support for AAC programs, and their new project, a series of tier 2 supports for their self-contained early childhood special ed classrooms that includes AAC apps and iPads for every student and teacher!

Before the interview, Chris shares a fantastic AI tool that will determine what the overall consensus view on a particular research question - consensus.app. It’s an AI search engine for research that allows you to ask a question and it will provide the academic field’s consensus siting research on that topic. This can be great resource for AAC myth busting!

Key ideas this week:

🔑 If you are creating an AAC newsletter, consider turning it into a blog post! This can make looking at previous newsletters more interesting, and is also a great way to catalog previous articles in a searchable way!

🔑 The Texas AAC team has “collaboration tickets” for their SLPs where they go out to campuses and help the SLPs there build their skills. Their focus is on empowering the SLP to implement while the AAC team acts in a supportive role.

🔑 Even though are AAC apps and iPads for every student in their self-contained early childhood classrooms, if a student looks like they are utilizing the AAC supports more often, that is a flag for the teacher and SLP to consider sending the student home with a dedicated device.

Links from this episode:

Consensus.app, an AI search engine for research that provides the academic research consensus on a question in understandable language.

Continuum of Language Expression (COLE), a systematic tool for educators to assess language development that Chris helped develop! bit.ly/colegooglesheets

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