October is AAC awareness month. This month is dedicated to creating more awareness for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC).
We would like to join in on the effort to underline the importance of AAC, and in particular literacy in AAC. Perhaps you have already participated in a lecture or spotted an article about this topic? For scientific research, we refer to the experts in the field. What we do want to talk about, however, is what Mind Express has to offer in terms of literacy.
Keyboards in pagesets
In our article about top-down vocabulary, we briefly discussed the importance of alphabet access. In robust communication systems, you don’t have to choose between symbol or text communication. Both are offered, for example, in Steps to language and SCORE.
In Steps to Language you have an alphabet keyboard available in levels 2 and 3. You can choose to use word prediction for some words and there’s a colour scheme for vowels.
> Download Steps to language for free.
In SCORE you can choose different keyboards. You have keyboards with word prediction, with special characters, capital letters and a phonetic alphabet. Choose what suits you best and try out SCORE free for 30 days
Stand-alone keyboards
We also offer a stand-alone keyboard with word and sentence prediction. The word prediction has been enriched with symbols. Ideal when you are balancing between text and symbol communication. Using this stand-alone pageset you can also have the following actions:
- Improve spelling mistakes with alternative word predictions.
- Easily hide the word and/or sentence predictions. This is useful during language class.
- Personalise your prediction lists. Add or remove words and phrases yourself.
- Structure your own messages and save them by category.
- Visualize what you want to say with the “tell with pictures” option.
Interactive reading and word games in Mind Express
There are a lot of free ready-made pagesets around literacy to get started with.
Interactive reading in Mind Express 5
Reading together can be so much fun and motivating. Mind Express 5 includes some ready-to-use pagesets for interactive reading. With these templates, you can create your own read-aloud book and build a beautiful library:
- “EZ book template“: EZ is a wink to the word ‘easy’. It is a basic template for making a book.
- “Create a book template“: contains more layout options than the EZ version.
- “EZ Book Example“: is an example of a completed or used EZ book template. This is an example of what the end result can be.
- Additional template “Stories“: Here you can collect the books you have made, as a library. Interactive example: add a sound or a GIF. Create multimodal booklet.
Word games
The Mind Express 5 file “Word games” is a start page with different themes. For each theme, you have a word list to practice different ways of working with. The words are loaded in different games, like:
- gallows,
- spelling exercise (word dictation),
- alphabetical order,
- deciphering words (putting them in the right order),
- missing letters (a bit of wheel of fortune),
- word search in a grid.
These word games can be accessed by touch/mouse, switches and eye tracking.
Educational exercises
We also offer some educational exercises for reading, spelling and comprehension:
- On word level: “Which pictures fit together?“
- On the level of sentences: “Which picture belongs to the sentence?“
- Linking the orthographic with the visual: “Place the three words next to the appropriate pictures“.
