Developing Your PrAACtical Learning and Resource Network

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Usually, our Strategy of the Month posts focus on things that SLPs and others can do to enhance AAC learning with their clients. In honor of ASHA’s Better Hearing and Speech Month, our strategy focuses on you, the SLP.
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Since we started blogging and using social media, we’ve learned a lot about professional learning networks and using the internet more effectively to access resources that enrich our work. That led us to our May Strategy, PrAACtical Learning and Resource Networks.
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Our plan is to share an AAC-related resource each day that will help in developing our professional resources. As we tell our graduate students, if you have a well-packed toolkit and you know what to do with those tools, nothing can stop you!
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We’ll be sharing resources that build on what you already know about and have, keeping a prAACtical focus, of course
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     Week 1: Facebook

     Week 2: Twitter

     Week 3: Internet

     Week 4: Digital Curation

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Facebook
Unless you’ve been living off the grid for a while, you already know about Facebook and most of you probably use it for catching up with friends, sharing photos with family, and getting a glimpse into the lives of others. Until relatively recently, we didn’t know just how rich the Facebook world is for connecting people with interests in disability, education, speech-language pathology, and technology.
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Using Facebook we’ve done things like:

• gotten access to free apps that we use in therapy
• learned about professional events that we wanted to support or attend
• found new communities of professionals and parents with amazing websites
• gotten quick and insightful answers to our questions
• found organizations that we didn’t know existed and shared the info with families
• learned about opportunities to get free resources (at least twice this led to families we work with getting free iPads for their children with disabilities.

We’ve benefited in ways that I couldn’t even have imagined before we started this journey.

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Our first Facebook group to share is Tech in (SPL) Education, whose purpose is to “collect and distribute tools, hardware ,and applications available for the enhancement of technology in education with emphasis in Special Education.” What makes this group special is their strong connection with other organizations and app developers. They are the go-to place for free or discounted apps that are useful to children and adults with special needs, like their link to this special page for Better Hearing and Speech Month,
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Hope you stop by and check them out.
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