The Final Catch Up

On Monday, I had a meeting with Dawn to discuss what is going on with the project, what direction the project is going in, and what I am going to be doing for the project this week. We want to keep the project very specific and localized to a limited number of students with needs for Assistive Technology, but also, I want to make the most out of the hours I am devoting to work on this project. For now, I am going to focus the project completely on the student with the Dynavox and the possible new student who I will evaluate on Tuesday next week. I am excited to see what will come of the new aspect of this project.

I also sent a lot of emails on Monday to confirm the time and place with the speech therapist for our meeting on Tuesday. I made sure that I knew when and where I was going, and everyone involved knew that I was getting the Dynavox from the school to take it to the speech therapist. That way there was no miss communication between the teacher, parent, speech therapist, and myself. The last thing I did on Monday was to work on editing my blog entry before uploading it to this blog spot.

On Tuesday, I went to meet with the speech therapist in Macon. She was completely amazing! We went into a conference room, and we talked about the project, and what we want for the student. I showed her what I have done to the dynavox, and then she really wanted to know how I did it. I was really impressed that she brought a pen and paper into our meeting to take notes and really learn how to work the device. When she thought of some pages she would like created, I walked her through how to do it, and then taught her how to connect the pages. She was so interested in how the device works and how I rewired each part that she actually kept the device after I left to make more pages and understand the device even better. I believe she was floored that I took the time, understood the device, understood her student, and wanted to help so much. After the meeting, I felt like I really had another person on the same page with me advocating for the student to use the device on a daily basis. The speech therapist is also willing to push the parent to use the device more often and in more situations than only at therapy or school. The largest complement she gave me was that she has met with two employees and representatives for the dynavox company, and in one hour, I had taught her and been more helpful than anyone else. She was amazed and sent me a thank you email after our meeting. She is also planning on us meeting up again, partnering, and helping her out in the future. This meeting was a great connection and leap forward with the project.

I worked a lot this week to update the blog and met with Dawn on Friday to prepare for Saturday's festival. The deep roots festival is tomorrow, and we are going to be promoting and educating about Digital Bridges. This will also let people know where Digital Bridges is going to be located now. The building is the one next to the Theater down town. I am excited to work the festival tomorrow and will blog about it very soon.

(5 hrs, 30 min)