#TalkingAAC 2025

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is dramatically impacting the lives of all of us, including students and individuals with disabilities, by taking traditional resources and supports to a new level of accessibility and sophistication. AI technologies can help individuals with disabilities participate in educational and leisure experiences, access information, and communicate more effectively. This includes the direct use of AI tools as instructional and assistive technology. Additionally AI tools can be used by professionals to increase efficiency, elevate the creativity and quality of lesson plans and learning materials, and analyze research, evidence, and data to reflect on practices and improve outcomes.  
This session explores some of the ways that educational professionals can use AI in an everyday context, along with the implications, benefits, and challenges associated with the use of AI. In the session, participants will learn exactly what AI is, and what it is not. Participants will be introduced to a variety of educational, creative, and productivity tools that leverage AI, including some that are likely already available to them. We will explore ways that learners can utilize AI, including increasing access to educational and therapy resources, providing feedback and insights, and enhancing learner or worker productivity. Participants will also explore ways that they can capitalize on AI to raise their own productivity, create customized therapy materials, and support their own professional learning. Participants will learn about strategies to use AI to: -spend less time writing emails, reports, and notes -make learning materials more accessible, including auto generated Alt-Text -enhance slide decks for professional learning or for use with clients -support spelling and grammar for clients (or themselves!) -expand vocabulary with word prediction and autocomplete -create custom reading passages to address decoding, comprehension and fluency skills -create custom voices for AAC -generate images with words -organizational and executive function support -analyze and synthesize research and data -and more!
Finally, participants will delve into necessary considerations regarding the implementation of AI, including data privacy, security, AI bias, ethical considerations, and reliability. This session will not be your typical sit and get lecture. Participants will get up close with AI tools through hands-on demonstrations, experiencing firsthand how they can be applied in therapy sessions. The presenter will share real-world case studies showcasing successful AI integration into educational practices, highlighting challenges overcome and outcomes achieved. As a group, we will share our experiences, concerns, and ideas about adopting AI in speech therapy and collaborate on the creation of a resource everyone can use and reference in the future.

The purpose of this presentation is to share our team’s experience implementing both low and high tech AAC in our preschool classroom while providing a safe space for an open and honest discussion with attendees to learn from everyone in attendance. When our current preschool special education team came together two years ago, we were overwhelmed with the level of communication needs in the classroom. There were between 20-24 students in our district Early Childhood Special Education classrooms, and all were non- or minimally speaking. Every caregiver listed communication as their primary concern at an IEP. We were experiencing a significant increase and escalation in behaviors as a direct result of these communication concerns.  Our team knew that we needed a more comprehensive and robust approach to support communication, and we were overwhelmed thinking about how to move forward. We were intimidated by all of the ideas and information coming from seasoned professionals or experts at conference presentations, consultants, and every SLP/Early Childhood/ASD/parent account on Instagram telling us what we should (or shouldn’t) be doing to create the ideal communication-focused classroom. We decided to jump in, knowing that mistakes would be made as we continued to learn.        

With the support of our county’s assistive technology and ASD consultants, we determined which supports we would use (108-icon county-wide core board and speech generating devices) and decided to focus our efforts on these areas:
Training of all staff
Modeling without expectation across all classroom activities
Supporting and involving families

The presentation will go into detail about what each of those areas looked like for us and how moving forward to just get started impacted our classroom, students, and their families. In each area, participants will be encouraged to share their thoughts, experiences, and ideas with the expectation that no one is the “expert,” and we can all learn from each other.