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A Mac and a grizzly


This was the winter wonderland yesterday, but now everything’s melted.

I have two stories for you today. Last Thursday I brought Ben for his weekly physio session. Ben complains bitterly but he is always in a chipper mood afterwards. As we walked down the hall to the 2nd floor rehab gym, there lying on the floor was a two-inch grizzly bear character. Ben was delighted with this find, but I told him we would put it on the bench in case someone lost it and was coming back to look for it.

Imagine my surprise when I got on the elevator on the 5th floor this morning and the same Grizzly was now sitting on the handrail inside. Ben loves to send his characters out into the world in different ways, and it seemed this Grizzly had had a bit of an adventure since last week.

Remember my post about my urge to buy the new iMac computer so that we could put the Proloquo2Go communication software on our iPad? We couldn’t modify it with our old Mac computer.

Well, we got the computer on Saturday. “You know why I have to do this, right?” I said to D’Arcy. “Yes, I know why you have to do it, even though I think you’re pulling at straws,” he said.

The keyboard is so tiny on the iPod that it’s challenging to use and I’m hoping the larger keyboard on the iPad will be easier. I think the picture symbols will be easier to see and with the latest technology, I should have a leg up in trying to customize it with our own photos. Ben's psychologist also recommended the iPad.

So we walked through the Eaton’s Centre carrying our big Mac box and then yesterday D’Arcy spent four hours on a support line with Apple because for some reason we couldn’t download the Proloquo app without losing the existing apps on our iPad. In fact, what I wanted to do was transfer the most recent backup from the iPod to the iPad but it at first proved impossible. You know how everything about a Mac is supposed to be intuitive and simple? Not so much for us!

In order to get Proloquo2Go on the iPad, we had to wipe our other apps, including the great Sign 4 Me app. After hours of instructions and comments like “That’s odd” from the support person, D’Arcy was rendered incapable of speaking -- about iPods or iPads or iMacs.

“I simply don’t know,” was the only way he answered questions last night.

I was later able to restore a backup from the iPod onto the iPad – minus the photo libraries. While restoring it, it said it could transfer some items and not all.

So now I have a ton of work to do to simplify the vocab and get real photos in there.

And Emma from Greece was correct that there is a way to 'turn off' the ability to delete the Proloquo2Go app, but we haven’t figured it out yet.

I have to thank Pam, a support person from AssistiveWare, who is trying to help us. Pam is the parent of a young adult with disabilities and I'm hoping will write us a guest blog.
Posted by Unknown at 12.13, Add Comment
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Now you see him, now you don't


It’s been cool to see families in the blogosphere reporting on their kids’ trials of different communication software that runs on an iPod.

For the last month, my son Ben has been using Proloquo2Go, which combines categories of words, picture symbols and photos, text-to-speech voices as well as a keyboard and a 7,000 word default vocabulary.

When you click on the iPod’s “app” screen, the owl pictured above appears alongside photos, iTunes and everything else you’d expect on an iPod.

Ben is part of a research project at Bloorview to see if Proloquo2Go increases his ability to communicate and meets his needs for a lightweight system he can carry.

The iPod itself is a perfect device for Ben – light, easy to manipulate with his small and weak fingers, and a platform he was already familiar with.

Some benefits we’ve seen are: he has photos of all his classmates in the device and suddenly we have a sense of how close he is to the other students and who he likes; he can make comments, which is how I learned he thinks I’m “cool;” he can easily ask for foods, drinks and activities he likes; he has access to a large vocabulary that includes exotic animals he loves; and we’ve been able to upload all of his Star Wars characters and their odd names, which we never had signs for.

When Ben woke during the middle of the night upset because he couldn’t find one of his characters, he could tell me it was “Hem Dazon” who was lost and we knew who to look for.

We still have a lot to learn with the Proloquo2Go, and need to work on making sentence construction easier. But we’re happy with the results: in addition to showing us he can read more than we thought, it’s enabled Ben’s personality to shine through.

Which brings me to last night. He brought me the iPod to show me that the Proloquo owl icon no longer appeared on the list of “apps.” It had vanished. I went into what my husband calls my “straight-to-panic” mode, and Ben signed that he had made the icon “go away.” When I asked if he deleted it, he nodded his head vigorously. Then he impishly signed “sorry.”

So today I have to get the researchers at Bloorview to reinstall Proloquo. I'm not pleased that Ben deleted it, and he better not do it again. But there's a part of me that's happy that he's so adept at using the iPod that he knew how. The kid has spunk!
Posted by Unknown at 06.51, Add Comment
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