Using the Fono applications in Special schools
Mgr. Zdenka Horanská, OŠ Hálkova, Bratislava
The Fono applications are simple programs suitable for patients with communication disorder and we have good experience with its use in our institution. We have been using four applications of Fono during the individual speech therapy sessions at our special school. The goal of the authors was to allow the trouble-free communication of a child with the software, and that goal we share. The active work of a child with the PC is aided by plethora of attractive pictures in combination with written text, video and voice recording. The individual work brings the advantage of lessening the stress from possible failure. We can also focus on correcting the mistakes since we have to neither present the exercises nor prepare the teaching aids.
Our experience is that children like to work with Fono1, the playful work enhances their active participation in achieving the set objectives. Those are of course individually adopted to child’s abilities using the application settings. Most of the children communicate with the PC on their own, the only exceptions are children with unpredictable behaviour.
The Fono1 suite consists of the Warm-up, Sounds of Everyday Life, Vocabulary and Phonematic Recognition. All of them work on the same principles of exercise and test, they all have settings that allow for adjusting the difficulty to individual needs of the child.
Vocabulary contains some 450 objects in 13 topics and three levels of difficulty. While working on diagnosis, we determine the status of child’s vocabulary, i.e. the active vocabulary using the exercise, passive vocabulary in the regime of testing. In therapy we are enhancing both the active and passive vocabulary, improve the speech readiness. We also stimulate the spontanneous speech, if appropriate we provoke it. We develop this way the pragmatics, lexical semantics, morphological – syntactic skill and also the phonetics – phonologic speech levels.
During the logopedice exercise can also be determined the ability of the child to recognize the distinctive features of mother tongue. We can use the application Phonematic Recognition with children that communicate. It contains 111 phonematic pairs with 28 phonemes.
The use of the application Sounds of Everyday Life is recommended for children that display decreased spontanneous communication, with the under-developed vocabulary. This application comprises 70 different sounds that are organized in 6 topics (e.g. animals, musical instruments, people, transport). Phonematic hearing of these children is nearly impossible to judge, hence we focus on their ability to distinguish the sounds of non-phonematic nature. During the therapy we develop auditory memory that will assist with further development work.
Initially we borrowed the Fono1 for testing (we purchased the license already) planning to use it during the individual speech therapy sessions, but the experience has shown that they can be used during other sessions of the teaching and upbringing process.