In part II of their AAC After Work presentation, Rachel and Chris do a deeper dive into storytelling with digital tools, aka digital storytelling. They go over all the different ways that digital tools can support storytelling and how we can use storytelling as a way to stimulate communication, support literacy, and teach core words! They also discuss “pre-story brainstorming” where you discuss the setting, characters, and problem/solution before you begin to create your story. 
 
Before part 2, Chris shares about an eye gaze user who he was asked to help support as part of the school team.  Previously, the parent was programming a unique page of vocabulary for each story the AAC user was going to read so the user could answer questions about the story. There was also a limited number of icons on each page of the user's screen. Chris shares about how worked with the family to increase the number of symbols/vocabulary on the screen after they discovered the student was able to target icons really well. He discusses about changes they also made to their implantation strategy so the student didn’t need a newly programmed vocabulary page all the time (e.g. descriptive teaching).
 
Key digital tools discussed this week:
 
? http://www.mystoryapp.org - allows students to create stories with pictures, stickers, describing words, and more. 
 
? Character generators (heroforge.com, peanutizeme.com, bitmoji.com) let you make a visual representation of a character, including things like what the character looks like, their emotions, outfit, pose, etc. You can then take a screenshot of the character and put that into a storytelling app. 
 
? storyboardthat.com - allows you to create comic-like storyboards
 
? picmonkey.com - drag words, icons, and more on top of digital images 
 
? thinglink.com - create a story around a single image by adding hyperlinks to the image.
 
? Edpuzzle.com - search for any youtube video and it allows you to add prompts/questions. Send videos to families to carry over practice - tell the family what to model when they are watching. 
 
? Loom.com - screen record or video of yourself that you can share with others, including ideas and feedback for a student’s communication partners.
 
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