Eleanor Francis: Creating a Video Modeling “TV Show” and Other Insights from Australia

The Talking with Tech team is joined this week by speech-language pathologist and AAC specialist Eleanor Francis to talk about AAC in Australia, literacy, video modeling, and more! Before the interview, Rachel and Chris mark the beginning of the school year with a discussion of Individualized Education Plan (IEP) meetings. Rachel and Chris chat how they maintain a good relationship with the entire IEP team, how to show the team their views are important, and ways to promote collaboration. Rachel and Chris then briefly touch on wording they try to avoid when writing reports (e.g., do we really know what a student was “able” to do, or just what they did?) and the pros and cons of using video to document client progress.

Following this discussion, Chris interviews Eleanor Francis, a speech pathologist who works with students with complex communication needs at a special developmental school in Melbourne, Australia. Eleanor shares about a number of interesting topics, including her tour of the US visiting AAC experts, recent changes to AAC in Australia, lessons learned from the recent ISAAC 2018 conference, and her experiences helping to create a video modeling "TV show" featuring her school’s staff and students called “MeTV”.

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