It's hard to believe how fast this school year is going, and that Kaylea and I (Camille) have been back from the 2015 ATIA Conference for 3 weeks! The conference was overwhelming, idea driven, and inspired by innovation. It was difficult to sift through so many different options of presentations every day, but we found some great ideas and wanted to share them with you here!
One presentation which was eye-opening was presented by Nancy Cleveland, a Registered Nurse who has 25 years of experience working with people with disabilities and eye-gaze technology. We learned how to do a simple eye-gaze test, the basics of how eye gaze works, and how eye gaze might be affected by different disabilities. For example, did you know that people with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) are likely to have dry eyes? Natural tears dry on the surface of the eye, and when tears are not continually forming to keep the surface of they eye wet and smooth, it becomes non-reflective and rough. An important component of an eye-gaze mouse is reflection off the surface of the eyes, so people with ALS need synthetic tears to use eye-gaze!
Another fun topic of presentation was 3D printing! At a session by Margaret Duggan Maceda, I was able to learn about the history of 3D printing, the types of 3D printers out there, and possibilities for creations using a 3D printer. And did you know that they have 3D scanners out there too? In a session by Betsy Beaumon and Karen Erickson, we learned real-world applications of 3D technology for students with disabilities. Creating tactile objects to enhance literacy and learning, especially for people with disabilities has become a reality, and many pre-designed 3D files can be found through The DIAGRAM Center. In addition, the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies is working on creating tactile core vocabulary objects to be used as Augmentative Alternative Communication for students with multiple/profound disabilities, including vision loss. Check out the link for the 3D vending machine!
Susan McCloskey, Sherry Uzzle, and Carrie McCormick gave a great reminder to be flexible and creative when mounting devices for students in wheelchairs. They reminded me to use industrial twisty ties which can be found at hardware stores to mount, position, and whatever else one can dream up for mounting devices. The great thing is that industrial twist ties are available at local hardware stores- no special order for that! Can you imagine all the things we could adapt with industrial twist ties? Karen Kangas provided some sharp-witted opinions on positioning for students with significant disabilities. She provided the thought that maybe our students who are confined to wheelchairs in the resting position should be allowed to experience the working position, where our bodies are angled forward with our core working and brains firing. We're excited to work with our fabulous Physical Therapists at school and see if we can't get our students in a better position for learning. |
| As always, we enjoyed the many sessions on Augmentative Alternative Communication (AAC)! We both attended a session on Kathy Howery's phenomenological (yes, that's a word!) research, where she listened to the stories of adolescents who speak with AAC and used them to provide insight to how we teach and treat students with communication barriers. I was reminded of the time and labor it takes to develop a fragment of communication as one must first think the thought, enter the message, then direct a device to speak. The reminder that people who use AAC deserve to be talked directly to (not their paraeducator), and deserve the wait time it takes to think-program-speak. Teaching a child where buttons/word are is not enough- we need to teach them LANGUAGE and how to show who they are through expression. I was told to teach vocabulary that gives a child instant access to inclusion. What a great reminder! Ms. Howery also shared several books which were written by and of people who use AAC (slide show on left). |
We learned about new products on the market from Maureen Donnelly and Karen Erickson for reading comprehension for people who use AAC. We were also reminded about great free resources for reading! Tar Heel Reader can be a great tool for adapting grade level literature for students with significant needs. What if general education classes used Tar Heel Reader to create chapter summaries that were accessible to students with disabilities?
Carole Zangari (coauthor of Praactical AAC) presented on teaching and facilitating narrative development with students who use AAC. She went over the four main types of narrative (easiest and most common for AAC users on the left of the info-graphic above to most difficult on the right). She reiterated that we should pick either macro- or micro- narrative structure to target. I appreciated the point that narrative can be a wonderful opportunity to start to facilitate problem-solving for students who use AAC. I also appreciated the reminder that narrative with children is almost always facilitated by an adult! Keep it natural and allow the back-and-forth conversation that flows naturally with narratives. Ms. Zangari even posted some of the other sessions at ATIA- check it out!
We were very impressed by the organizational ideas given to us by Amy Golding in her presentation on how to become more organized with our AAC users. She suggested an awesome binder system where information on each AAC user's modes of communciation, instructional strategies, data, questions, and hooray moments is kept. We have already started to implement it!
Kaylea attended a brief session on LAMP (I've been through the whole training twice) and discovered the power of motor memory! As the trainers at lamp like to remind us, we have a pretty powerful motor memory- like knowing which finger to fire at which moment for touch typists. Therefore, why don't we make vocabulary on AAC easier and more accessible for students by putting words in the same spot, or by starting with a larger vocabulary grid and hiding buttons to start so students don't have to lose valuable motor memory.
Kaylea attended a brief session on LAMP (I've been through the whole training twice) and discovered the power of motor memory! As the trainers at lamp like to remind us, we have a pretty powerful motor memory- like knowing which finger to fire at which moment for touch typists. Therefore, why don't we make vocabulary on AAC easier and more accessible for students by putting words in the same spot, or by starting with a larger vocabulary grid and hiding buttons to start so students don't have to lose valuable motor memory.
Kaylea also attended a session on phonics, phonological and phonemic awareness for people who cannot speak. When you think about it, people who do not have access to accurate verbal speech don't have the same opportunities as their peers who can say a sound, hear the auditory feedback from that sound, and make connections to an orthographic symbol. Lynn Ahlgrim-Delzell and Joni Nygard presented the product that Attainment company is creating based on research by Ahlgrim-Delzell and colleagues with promising outcomes. We are excited to see the product soon!
My, this is getting long, but there are a few more things we learned! There were some great sessions on assistive technology for reading, writing, and math too! Debora Perlenfein and Lindie Schweitzer shared the outcome of their search to utilize chrome apps for students with disabilities, and thus mediate a budget issue (sound familiar?). They found some great apps, which cover multiple areas. (Thanks to Michelle Thomas and Maureen Castillo from our own Adams12 for already teaching me some of these!) Beth Poss also presented information on accessible and free resources to use as assistive technology so students can access the common core. Here are some ideas for chrome apps that could help:
My, this is getting long, but there are a few more things we learned! There were some great sessions on assistive technology for reading, writing, and math too! Debora Perlenfein and Lindie Schweitzer shared the outcome of their search to utilize chrome apps for students with disabilities, and thus mediate a budget issue (sound familiar?). They found some great apps, which cover multiple areas. (Thanks to Michelle Thomas and Maureen Castillo from our own Adams12 for already teaching me some of these!) Beth Poss also presented information on accessible and free resources to use as assistive technology so students can access the common core. Here are some ideas for chrome apps that could help:
Web UseHow about some apps to help mediate use of the web browser itself. Too many adds? AdBlock. Need the page to be larger? Zoom! Need spelling and grammar check? Ginger. | Reading on the WebHow do you access great reading materials for students? Bookshare has a free reader. Kindle has a free reader. Booktrack pairs written material with a soundtrack! |
Organization and Note-taking | Reading |
Students need help staying organized? Why don't we set them up with one of these free apps? Vision | Assistive Technology for reading can range significantly from the tools that reduce distractions like Clearly to the tools that will reduce the amount of material that needs to be read like TLDR (which stands for "too long didn't read") or Cruxlight. And a great resource is the free side of Read&Write which will read text out-loud! Writing |
Most of these go along with reading, but are great resources for changing color, contrast, text size, text type, and reducing clutter from the web! | From creative apps like Powtoon and Glogster to speech-to-text apps like Dictate and Translate, there is a myriad of tools supporting writing. The one sad thing is that I haven't heard of a high quality word prediction app or extension that is free yet. But hopefully someday soon! |
I will write about one final presenter, Ms. Carol Allen, who closed the conference for me with a cheeky presentation on Mobile Technology and Inclusion. I'm not going to lie, I was hoping to learn about apps for assistive technology on phones. Instead I was reminded how SILLY we are with not making our mobile technology mobile! Mobile, as in moving, not a synonym for telephone. Why are students sitting at desks when we have chrombooks, tablets, and iPads that can move with the student? Food for thought.
Last, but not least. We visited EVERY exhibit at the conference. We saw far too much to put here, but here are some pictures of the fun we had with eye gaze, sensory vests, and robots!
Last, but not least. We visited EVERY exhibit at the conference. We saw far too much to put here, but here are some pictures of the fun we had with eye gaze, sensory vests, and robots!