5 Things We Love About the AAC Evaluation Genie

We loved it as a computer program and now we love it as an app. 

1. The AAC Evaluation Genie app covers a lot of ground, starting with simple discrimination tasks all the way up through word prediction.

2. It helps keep us organized and focused in the app portion of the assessment process: The way the assessment activities are laid out helps us move beyond picture identification in a organized fashion.

3. It allows for a lot of flexibility. How many times have you done an AAC evaluation where you prepared for a client with a certain set of skills, only to find yourself face-to-face with someone whose skills are way above or below what you planned for? It’s great when you have a tool that will let you move easily to another set of tasks when the need arises.

4. It accommodates both direct selection and scanning. 

5. The testing process also helps us teach the client what to do. In the picture discrimination set, for example, we can start at a very easy level (e.g., set of three 5-inch pictures) to help the client gain experience with the task so that when we get to the larger fields (it goes up to 32 1-inch pictures), the client knows what to do. The Genie makes it progressively more challenging and allows us to see how the client does with an increasingly larger field of options.

Thanks, Celeste Helling, for this very useful tool!