The idea of of DailyCues is simple. Cuers share what they know and learn something new everyday. Our website is designed so that registered users add and edit much of our content. Our aim is to create a website that evolves with the members and values of our community.
Well, you are. The site is driven by members like you. (Seriously, didn't you read the top of this page?) But who started the site? Ok, fair question. This site started with the work of two people Brad Buran, PhD (who is a complete genius) and Thomas Shull, M.S., CCC-SLP (who is not a genius, but who is occasionally funny.)
DailyCues was created in 2004 by Tom Shull, a nationally certified transliterator and Cued Speech instructor. As an instructor, he found that certain questions came up frequently among his students. The most efficient solution was to create a website where he could post events, links, and answers to those common questions.
Tom later added quizzes, games, and activities using a third-party site to provide support for people who were learning to cue and for professionals preparing for tests. Soon after, others began using the site.
Tom is a speech-language pathologist for Boston Public Schools working primarily with students who have language-learning disabilities and/or mild to moderate cognitive challenges.
Brad met Tom Shull in 2003 when working at Cue Camp Friendship. Brad's involvement with DailyCues started in 2008. A graduate of MIT's Speech and Hearing PhD program and an auditory scientist at Oregon Health and Science University, Brad is our webmaster. He's the one you blame when your article mysteriously disappears or your login keeps getting rejected. Surprisingly, many of the programming skills Brad acquired through his research came in handy when building the current version of DailyCues. Who knew that a PhD would be so useful?
In addition to DailyCues, Brad and Tom co-teach several advanced transliterator courses through Language Matters, Inc. You should attend. People describe the classes as "super helpful", "informative", and a "huge skills boost". They also describe Brad as "patient", "caring", and "disarmingly handsome." They report that Tom is "punctual."
The original DailyCues site was a collection of simple pages written in html. (That's nerd lingo for a not-so-sophisticated website).
The community told us that they wanted more – lessons, video, and games. Maintenance was tough. We realized we couldn't generate all of the content we wanted to make available. The site needed to expand beyond its original purpose. We knew we needed to start from scratch and make an entirely new website.
The current site has been several years in the making (created while Brad juggled his PhD and Tom completed his master's in speech-language pathology).
We are grateful to our beta testers for their time, expertise, advice, and support: Carrie Apple, Marisa Bennett, Beth Blair, Naomi Bramhall, Sam Cappiello, Sed Eftekhari, Ashley Elder, Hilary Franklin, Dianne Green, Penny Hakim, Shannon Howell, Suhad Keblawi, Brian Kelly, Claire Klossner, Ben Lachman, Jeff Maslin, Emilie Mulholland, Andy Payonk, Lauren Pruett, Sarine Roffé, Aaron Rose, Amy Ruberl, and Iva Tullier.
We are also especially grateful to Beth Blair who voluntarily recorded herself cueing the most frequently used words in English. She's one of the people who pops up in our dictionary. In additional to being a great cuer, she plays a mean drum and is also pretty darn funny.
The layout for DailyCues was designed by Wing Ngan at ink design, inc.