Post Parent Meeting

I am so excited because I got to meet with the parent today of the child who I really want to work with for this project. The meeting went wonderfully, and everyone is on the same page and on board with the project. We will be doing a filming of us working with the device either Tuesday or Thursday of next week so that other people can see exactly what we are doing with this project. I also got the parent to fill out the initial evaluation which gave me great background information for the project and some information about how to move forward from where we are right now.

I am going to have to change the third/social scenario, but it makes complete sense because the student does not enjoy restaurants, so the social environment needs to be some place that the child cares about and is motivated about in order to have a great reaction there. His favorite social place is church, and I would love to make him feel more successful and comfortable there in his Sunday School class.

I actually was granted permission to take the device home with me today and have it for two weeks to work with it, learn it and reprogram the device for him to try along with his family and teacher. I am so excited to work with it and learn about how it works and what makes it so difficult. The hardest aspects of the Dynavox are the social aspect and the technological aspect. I am ready to see these challenges right up close and personally these next two weeks.

One suggestion that was made was for me to contact the student's Speech Language Pathologist because she was also frustrated with the device. The progress that the device brings is obvious, but the SLP was not comfortable recommending the device to others because she could not help them when problems arose with the devices. The parent said that this woman would love to have me come in and teach her how to work the device better and make her more comfortable suggesting Dynavox devices for therapy in the future. This would be an amazing outlet into helping the community through helping one person.

Working backwards, on Monday I met with Dr. Wills to plan for the meeting, printed out information for the meeting, sent emails, made plans for the next few steps in the project, and got myself fully prepared for the meeting. The work so far took a great turn in progress today. I am very pleased.

(4 hrs)