We had to work on a number of skills ourselves in order to interpret details of the case study, learn to use ProloquotoGo, and create a realistic selection set. Originally, we agreed that we would create something like a factor tree to create categories and examples within it, but the more we added, and the greater depth we established, our original plan had very little resemblance to what we ended up with. I wish we had given more time to deciding how we would present our "Bella"'s sets, but within a couple of hours, three people learned to use all of the features of the app, make decisions to match the profile of a specific student, create several levels of communication for a student, and share it.
As we worked through our decision-making, it felt natural to consider and discuss linguistic, communicative, and linguistic abilities, but really was a challenge not to take for granted physical and sensory abilities. Luckily the settings offer choices for many of these options (size of selection cells, auditory feedback, colour of cells/background, etc.). It was also quite natural to think of questions and answers, but the challenge was to predict situations in which the user could use their device (THEIR being another key, it makes sense that the primary user needs to have continuous access- not just when they are receiving support/instruction) to extend conversations. As far as usability goes, being in a group of three members all learning the app, and creating many levels/depths of messages- we got confused between saving a sentence as a category and saving it as a message....although that allowed us to create even deeper levels at a later time. The exercise also really gave us a new appreciation for how vital our speech-language pathologists must be in the process.
A sampling of some other AAC apps on the iTunes store:
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