My Mecca

Word Prediction feature with Proloquo2Go

Extended School Year is a mecca for those of us who are speech pathologists and who want to try out different programs, iPad applications, or therapy techniques with children. There are so many speech kids! Of course, we honor the current IEPs, but sometimes, we (SLPs) have extra time with a child and just want to see if something works or doesn't work.  Maybe the SLP just wants to get new insights, or the SLP is teaching her graduate student intern a new program, so today we tried out the word prediction/typing feature of Proloquo2Go with an 8 year old girl (limited speech due to apraxia but good receptive skills).   Our lesson was a bit stilted--the child was merely asked to provide very simple sentences in response to pictures in a book.  From this lesson, we learned that this girl was able to provide initial consonants for any word she had to type, and she recognized many sight words. She knew that she had to produce a simple sentence.  She knew about simple punctuation, and she really liked the auditory feedback.  She preferred to just type the words as best she could, and needed support for the spelling.  Proloquo2Go had a little difficulty predicting what she wanted to type since her choice of words were out of context of other sentences.  I felt that she definitely has potential for using word prediction and exploring this in conjunction with other AAC systems looks promising!  Tomorrow we'll try actually using this for communication (rather than just labeling)!   I'm eager to see how she does!