Rachel Madel & Chris Bugaj: ATIA Recap 2024 (Part 2)

Talking With Tech AAC Podcast

This week, Rachel and Chris continue their discussion about the highlights and takeaways from ATIA 2024! They share some of their favorite presentations and poster sessions from Lauren Enders, Brenda Del Monte, Bruce Alter, Tina & Mateo Moreno, Karanveer Singh, EdTech, and more!

Key Ideas this Week:

🔑 The Joy Zabala Fellowship is an organization that supports early career professionals working with students with disabilities by connecting them with a seasoned mentor. The mentee and mentor work together to strengthen the skills of the mentee and, afterwards, to share what they learned with the larger stakeholder community.

🔑 At a session on AI, Chris asked Bruce Alter if we should still be teaching students to code or if we should only be teaching them to use AI to write the code for them. Bruce replied that “not an either/or question, it’s an ‘and’ question.” Students need to learn to code, and also to effectively use AI to write code. A student can’t understand what code the AI has given them or correct bugs if they have no idea how to code themselves.

🔑 EdTech is a session where people ask questions and then the group splits up into different parts of the room to have breakout discussions on some of the topics posed. This year, Rachel really enjoyed discussing supporting creativity in education. Rachel utilizes a lot of creative arts in her therapy activities. It’s nice, because the client is motivated to be creative and the family gets to see what they made afterwards.

🔑 One theme at ATIA this year was the Specific Language System First Approach, which was created by Chris himself! Chris has recently created an online class about the specific language system first approach - learn more here!

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