Communication Skills Project Results

name: Kelly Mendrzycki

HowItWorkedOut

I combined assistive technology and communication into my project. I started out trying to increase one student's communication and ended my project increasing all of my students' communication. I became more aware of the difficulty in understanding choices presented to my studnets. I decided to visual represent the school lunch menu to start. I thought most of my students knew what choice they were making for lunch. We serve two different choices everyday. I use Boardmaker to make my pictures. Each morning I put up the two picture(with the text) on the board. The students then go up to the board and choice #1 or #2. I began to noticed that my students were making different choices than they normally did and they were eating better! Since this worked so well, I decide to visually represent more of their day. For the past 2 years I have had individual picture schedules for my students. This had helped them during transitioning. I branched it out farther with this project. I broke down each block of time into three or four items. This allowed for my students to know what was next and to see an end. It was a lot of work to get everything set up but now that it is in place I cannot believe the outcome. My class seems to flow nicely and it has reduced the number of behaviors. The other challenge I had was my paraprofessionals. They were acustomed to the program running one way and did not want to change. Now that we have using this system, they also cannot believe the change. This project was a success for my students and staff. I will use a system like this in the future. I am already looking into ways to use more pictures and other communication/assistive tech. devices for my students next year.

name:

Chris M. Pilch

HowItWorkedOut

I combined communication skills and assistive technology in my project. I based my project around one of my students who was three years old at the beginning of this project and suffers from Rhetts Syndome. I used Boardmaker, a Big Mac and built a pvc frame to attach pictures from Boardmaker in order set up a communication system with Paula. Paula has lost her ability to speak and when she becomes frustrated in making her needs known she bites herself. The pvc frame did not work at this time. Paula would not even come near it. I was hoping that we could tell by her eye gaze what picture she was looking at, but maybe when she is older we will try it again. We did get Paula to activate the Big Mac when we placed a picture of someone drinking on it. She is not consistent in activating the Big Mac, but hopefully the more she does and comes to realize that if she wants something, all she had to do is activate the button. We are hoping to use more pictures on another Big Mac to meet some of her other needs.

Paula will be in the school system for may more years. It will be an ongoing task to need her growing needs and we will have to come up with many other ideas in order to do so. This is just the tip of the iceberg of the types of assistive technologies we will need to implement in communicating with Paula.

name:

Aaron Bonnett

HowItWorkedOut

I researched the internet and talked to several physical education teachers to get ideas on how to increase and build communication skills in physical education. The best website that I found was PECentral.com. I basically found three ideas that I thought I could implement into the classroom in the future for students in grades 3-6. The first is the use of journals. The journal is used to have students write in to express their feelings and ideas about physical education. Each time they write in their journal, I decide what the topic will consist of. What I like about this is that students will hopefully feel more confident and comfortable to express themselves on paper rather than having to do it face to face. I will also be able to read their work and learn about what kids are liking, disliking, and what areas of PE they are grasping. It can be a real learning tool for me as well as the students. The second communication technique is group class discussion. Before starting the class activity students come together to openly talk about the day’s activity. Topics can consist of strategy, problem solving, student behavior, etc, in regards to the day’s activity. At the end of the class the students come back together and talk about how the activity went. Readdress the topics which were first discussed. Students can talk about what they enjoyed, what they didn’t enjoy, and what went well or what went wrong. Then the students can discuss how they could fix any problems that they encountered. The third communication item that I found was the use of a monthly newsletter. This newsletter would be sent out to the students parents. In this newsletter I would discuss what students have been doing in physical education and what are the upcoming activities and dates to remember. The newsletter can be a way to allow parents to better understand what is trying to be accomplished in physical education. I believe that this would be a great tool for allowing parents to be involved and informed with their child’s education.