tors hadn’t taken a test in many years. For that reason, we la- beled our assessments, “Check for Understanding”. Having an assessment enables administration or teachers to determine if the paraeducator understands the topic or if they need further information and training before moving on to the next module. An Accessible Classroom Our last obstacle was how to organize and present the ma- terials. Google Classroom was our best option as our district was promoting G Suite within our schools. It made sense. Best of all, we would be teaching the paraeducators to utilize the technology we wanted our teachers and students to use. Too often we train the administrators, train the teachers, train the therapists and overlook the need to train the paraeducators (... again). Moreover, we were able to share our classroom with oth- er districts (outside of G Suite) enabling them to download ma- terials, make their own classrooms and copy the assessments. Results As mentioned earlier, this program worked great with the support staff working with the adults. I also used the trainings to train teachers, SLPA’s and paraeducators. We shared the class- room with AT Trainers in Arizona, California, Colorado, Louisiana, Minnesota, New Mexico, Texas and Wisconsin. Feedback has been very positive and has prompted us to make changes. We added separate objectives for participants to view before start- ing each module. We changed the order in which we presented each topic. Additionally, two more modules were added to the classroom. We felt we needed to add an introduction module to show participants how the trainings would work and how unintimi- dating they were! We wanted to start them off with a bang and build enthusiasm while also conducting a powerful activity to start this experience. In addition, a 12th module was added to recognize their el- evated knowledge. The 12th module is called “Celebrations”, and takes time to acknowledge their accomplishment but also outline their responsibilities moving forward. The expectation is not only that they promote the use AAC into the daily lives of their students, but also it is expected that they empower their teammates by sharing their new expertise in augmentative and alternative communication strategies. There are many school districts that are successfully imple- menting AAC into their school day. There are even more SLPs, therapists, AT Trainers, Special Education Teachers and parents that made it their personal mission to keep informed and utilize research-based strategies to increase outcomes for the students they work with. For Candice and I, this project was about the un- derserved, under informed and untrained paraeducators. This was for the educational teams that needed access to resources in a condensed, time sensitive platform. This project focused on the motivated caretakers that craved information but had diffi-
culty navigating through the wealth of information available. It is possible to deliver training and information even in the small- est increment of time slots. This project was for our paraeduca- tors and for those educators that believe that investing in our paraeducators will exponentially increase our outcomes for stu- dents using AAC. Empowering our paraeducators can be the key to successful implementation. Free samples of this project are available upon request. References IDEA Part B Issue Brief: Personnel Qualifcations. (2019). Re- trieved June 12, 2019, from https://www.asha.org/Advocacy/ federal/idea/IDEA-Part-B-Issue-Brief-PersonnelQualifcations/ National Resource Center for Paraeducators. (2019). Retrieved June 11, 2019, from http://www.nrcpara.org/ Stephanie Faso Colloquium May 2019 - YouTube. (2019). Retrieved June 3, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=NHXbZRu8PEE Training Resources for Supervisors. (2019). Retrieved June 12, 2019, from https://para.unl.edu/teacher/index.lasso
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