My past 2 blogs have been about how to access the internet  and how to easily listen to the radio. I have one more really fun thing I want to share.  I think kids will really like this one! 

As a kid I wanted to be a policeman.  What kid doesn’t?  Policeman, fireman, pilot, train conductor, all of these are fun for kids to pretend to be.  I was lucky.  I had a police scanner and I used to listen to radio calls.  Kids love to pretend they are on different missions and I was no different.  And there was nothing cooler than hearing a live audio feed from a police call somewhere. 

So if you know of a kid with a new device but has no interest in it, or his friends are not real comfortable approaching him with the device, you might want to consider finding a way to make the device more fun for the child and come up with an ice breaker to make communicating with friends easier.  One way to do both is to tap into kids’ desires to be police or heroes.   Using the Internet you can pull scanner feeds from anywhere in the United States.  It’s easy to do and it can even be done on speech devices with active internet connections! 

To do this, use an on-screen keyboard to program http://www.radioreference.com/apps/audio/ as a link.  A map of the United States will come up.  The augmented communicator can then select a state, town, and county to hear a scanner feed from.  While doing this, the child learns a bit about geography by using the map.  Before you know it, the kid has live feeds coming out of the Vmax and becomes a big part of play time with the other kids.  You can also create pages so the kid can pretend to respond to calls.  Or, you might put in siren noises, car noises, or anything to help motivate the child to use the Vmax.   

If the device can be both fun and educational, a child or adult will have an easier time wanting to use it.  I think interaction needs to start out as fun and move into more serious situations and settings.  This way the device slowly becomes a part of the person and something they want to use, rather than one more piece of equipment that makes them stand out.  If he can feel normal and good about having a device, it makes it must easier to learn how to use it. 

I gotta go, there’s a 4 alarm fire in progress!  See you in my next blog.  Over and out.