Seeing this video of Schuyler and her family totally made me smile.
It also reminded me of when my very young students got a couple Tango loaners in the mail and they couldn’t get past how very cool all the bubble wrap was that they came packed in! So we talked with the Tangos about bubble wrap. 
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by Samuel Sennott
There is much to say about the terrific time experienced at the ASHA Convention 2009 in Chicago this past week. It was terrific to be with friends in Chicago. From being picked up at the airport by a family who facilitated me coming to consult at her daughter’s school to stumbling upon the famous Gino’s and eating deep dish pizza with a friend, to walking Chicago, to the terrific people met at the convention, I enjoyed the experience thoroughly. All of the fun seemed to help the learning sink in deeper. Overall, I was very much impressed with the beauty of downtown Chicago. Plus for me as a house music fan it was a special experience to visit the place where the term house music was formed. Yet, before I get to the technical, here is a visual review of some of the experience.
ASHA
The Mass of ASHA
Meeting Schuyler @ ASHA
The Bean
Swirl @ the Bean
The Art Institute
Sun, Lion @ AI Chicago
Art Institute Chicago
Navy Pier
Chicago Skyline
Dancing
Chicago is One of the Cradles of House Music
Deep Dish Pizza @ Ginos
Gino
by Samuel Sennott
I highly recommend this book, Schuyler’s Monster, by Robert Rummel-Hudson. (Pronounced -Sky as in blue and -ler as in ler)
Schuylers Monster book cover
Reading Schuyler’s Monster made me feel the same way I felt four years ago when I just happened to pick up the New York Times and read Is There a Place in Class for Thomas in the Sunday Magazine. It made me feel the way I felt when I saw Including Samuel in Montreal at ISAAC three weeks ago. It made me feel similar to how I felt the first time I heard Linda Burkhart speak at Closing the Gap. It made me feel the way I felt when I heard Karen Erickson and David Koppenhaver at their summer Literacy in AAC seminar.
It made me cry. It made me laugh. It made me believe that what I am doing is right. So if you are a parent, a friend, a speech pathologist, a student in speech or education, a director of “fill in the blank”, please consider reading this book. It goes there. Yet, sometimes, whether it is a gutsy move at a dinner with some friends, (multiple meanings), or leaving it all to live your dream, you just might have to go there. So if you can’t get to this link at Amazon, or you can’t hit up your local Barnes and Noble or Borders, check out the blog. http://www.schuylersmonsterblog.com
by Samuel Sennott
Two years ago, when I first started recording voices using Audacity and pitching and working with the tempo to change adult voices into child like voices (what I call language banking) for recording in various AAC devices my students were using, I had a dream of a text to speech voice that aged with the student. I think that this probably will be an option for the future. I imagine that you could do some workups right now doing some time elapsed pitch and tempo adjusts in some of the high quality voices available now.
This thought reemerged as I read a post on the Schuyler’s Monster Blog post, Vox monstrum.
Thinking about this makes me remember those moments when I show children how I can make my voice turn into a little boy or girl sounding voice. They like having a kid voice in their co-planned sequenced social scripts or songs, rather than an adult male or female voice as recorded from teachers.
This also reminds me the that it is long overdue to get the definitive language banking guide up. Hopefully by ISAAC that can happen.
