WE ARE HANDS AND VOICES!Well the board anyway.
(Not just one fruitcake! HA! You had to be there)
Kelly Phonaks's booth
If you are an Advanced Bionic person then you know these famous monkeys!Fun 2 days! Yesterday after work I went over to the UALR Audiology & Speech department and we had a pizza supper and board meeting for Arkansas Hands and Voices. (www.arhandsandvoices.org ) Met lots of new folks who are on there own journeys into the world of Audiology stuff. Some have kids who are deaf or hard of hearing. Some are educators and some are hearing /speech professionals.
One of the national Hands and Voices folks spoke and helped us to form our guide. I'll admit when it comes to all this bylaws and legislation sort of stuff, I'm not to sharp. I shy away form politics. But that was just a small part of it.
Today the conference started and it was a packed room at the Hilton! Lots of folks from all sorts of area, both sign and vocal groups were there. I've not met a person I didn't like yet!
The exhibits include two of my favorites! Advanced Bionics and Phonak. I spoke with Kelly for a while today. She is the Phonak rep. Super nice lady! We were talking about a new Phonak product coming out and I'm going to test drive one! Maybe the zebra striped one! I'll catch up with Joann (Advanced Bionics) tomorrow.
There has been so much discussion today about different areas and issues of hearing. It's sort of like when I went to Dallas to Echo. This is going into overload mode! It's been great to hear the parents stories and the educators. Some of them I just really can't imagine. And some of them I just want to call a few schools and say, "Hey, you know that money you got because there is a kid with hearing troubles in your school? Show me what you've done with it!" I think some of the schools have some explaining to do but no one seems to regulate it much.
Tonight we had a parents meeting/dinner and while I wished we had had more there it was a nice mix and got to meet even more folks. I met a guy who trains service dogs and that was fun! I asked him what was the most interesting thing he had to train a dog to do and he told me about one dog that when owner sneezed the dog give them a kleenex.
One of the reps showed me a very very VERY cool thing that is FREE where you make a call and it goes through your computer and it captions everything you and the other person says! I'll give out more info after I try it this weekend.
Speaking of weekend... man I've got to get some riding in! Whew!
I gotta tell you... I'm ready for the weekend!
Life is good!
2 comments:
I HAVE those monkeys on top of the bookshelf by the bed! :) I have a collection of monkeys and they are my favorites!!!
My guess is that perhaps you were looking at Sorenson's IP Relay System? I used that for a while last year while I was deaf as a brick and it was really great to be able to read everything right there on the laptop screen!! :)
Sounds like a great conference!!! Thanks for sharing the things you are learning!
It's neat to attend conference like this. So are you attending HLAA in Nashville next year? Jennifer (aka Sweetpea) is the person in charge of the event
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