AT Tools for Everyone's Toolbox, Part One:

In December I wrote a post, "Self -Accomodation Should be a Standard of Daily Life". In it we looked at the ways we accommodate the tasks we do day to day. We looked at how students need to have tools that are accessible to them and help them accommodate their learning. It is also important that all the tools be available to all learners with equal access.

Assistive Technology
The definition of Assistive Technology according to IDEA is:

“Any item, piece of equipment or product system, whether acquired commercially off the shelf, modified, or customized, that is used to increase, maintain, or improve the functional capabilities of children with disabilities.”

Assistive Technology has lived behind the special education boundary lines for a long time, but trends are pushing us forward and prodding us with the idea that assistive technology and universal design principles aren’t just for our special needs population, but should be integrated into learning for everyone. Students spend 7 -8 hours a day in the process of learning new things and experiencing challenges to succeed. They certainly deserve as much of a level-playing field as we can give them.Think about the words “increase, maintain or improve”. There are greater demands on educators for accountability to demonstrate that all our students are increasing and improving test scores and mastery of common core goals. We want to see our student’s knowledge and abilities increase and improve, but students with degenerative disabilities may struggle just to maintain, so we need to make sure we include them in this too. If I feel that I have to work harder sometimes to maintain, just think about how our students feel! Put yourself in your student’s shoes and you will realize accommodations need to be there for everyone.
What are the tools to help them on this “Road to Success”?
There are low-tech, mid-tech and high-tech tools for student accommodation. Below is an overview of the low tech tools that should be available. In future posts we will cover mid and high tech tools as well as links to specific free software and video tutorials.

Low Tech Tools:
Low-tech tools are things like special pens and pencils, highlighters, scissors with special grips, pencil grips, embossed line paper, slant boards, transparent color overlays to lay over text for reading, text-framing strips, highlighter tape, colored keyboard labels, number lines and counting boards, enlarged worksheets, page magnifiers, fidget toys to help with concentration and sensory issues, highlighters, tabs, color-coded folders and visual schedules for organization. Having these things available in an organizer for class access would be one low-cost way to expand tools for accommodations.
Guide your students in understanding how they learn and show them how and when to use tools that make it easier for them. You might sit down with your students in a conference format and work with them to fill out a “Personal Learning Styles and Tools Profile” that helps them think through and check the things they know would help them succeed. Adjust and adapt it throughout the term or school year and help them define and focus-in on the tools that work the best for them in different situations.
Taking the time to set up the foundations for accommodation can reap huge benefits for all your students and establish life-long patterns for success.

Resources:
To check out an online comprehensive toolbox go to: http://udltechtoolkit.wikispaces.com/
A great place to see many low tech tools in one spot is http://www.onionmountaintech.com View their LoTTIE (Low Tech Tools for Inclusive Education) kits.

All the best to you!
Lon

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Merging AT and General Ed: FCTD Showcases No Limits to Learning

When Worlds Merge: AT and Instructional Technology in the General Ed Classroom
I was honored last month to be asked by The Family Center on Technology and Disability (FCTD) to be interviewed and showcased for the November Issue. I spent about an hour and a half on the phone with the writer from New York. We had a semi-formal interview until it came out that I had been the recipient of a torn right vetebral artery and continue to spend time with an "invisible disability". Come to find out, the writer has had his own processing and learning disability his entire life. Once we established that common ground, we had all sorts of things to talk about.
The editor sent me the rough draft to edit and return. I made a few corrections, but I am amazed at how smart they made me sound! Really, I guess we all just do what we do and don't really think anyone would want to dedicate an entire issue of a newsletter just on what makes up our profession, beliefs, committments and discipline - but that is what they did and there are some good nuggets in there if I may say so myself.
They have an awesome staff, writer, and editor - thanks to them, you will find the information presented with some interesting ideas to chew on. They have included some nice links from my blog posts and interviews as well as mentioning the Assistive Technology Blog Carnival and the Blog Talk Radio -No Limits 2 Learning Live talk show, (Which by the way will have my good friend Ron Graham on today at 10 a.m. Pacific, who is blind and is a blogger (Access Ability) and advocate for UDL and equal access as well as a former director for student accessibility in higher ed. - now retired and donating time to work in public school work with children and vision impairments. His story is AMAZING. Check it out!)

I am very proud and honored to be one of the professionals that FCTD has chosen to include in their resources. You can read the issue at: http://www.fctd.info/resources/newsletters/displayNewsletter.php?newsletterID=10064
FCTD has also asked me to co-moderate a discussion thread on their newly re-vamped site next month (December 2008) on advocacy and school partnerships. I will be sharing the moderation with an expert parent advocate so I am excited about that. I will let you know details when I get the specifics. I hope you will join us.
No Limits 2 Learning .com
I also have my companion website up and going now. There are some interviews, archives, activities and pdf's for download there from my trainings as well as a section I am building on links to free resources. I am constantly adding and building there so check in often: http://www.nolimits2learning.com/
I refer in my FCTD interview to an Action Steps for Advocacy Report that will be available. It is done, but I want to give you a subscription to a newsletter where I will periodically share news like the above with you and share free resources, reminders and links to upcoming interviews, etc. So I am working on a page to have you sign up to get the free report as a download AND the newsletter. I am trying to get that link done and ready on both this blog and the website. I will try and get it done ASAP. Also, your email address will stay exclusively with No Limits 2 Learning and will NEVER be sold or given away to others.
I guess that's all the news for now - there are all kinds of interesting folks we are planning to interview in the near future and projects getting launched. I hope they are of value and interest to you - they sure are fun and enriching for me. I am honored to be able to do this. Thanks so much for your support in reading and listening.

All the best to you!
Lon




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Ask the Expert: Mp3 Interview with Dr. Joy Zabala on Copyright Issues and IDEA 2004

Dr. Joy Zabala is the pioneer innovator of the SETT process for evaluation and implementation of Assistive Technology. She is also the project manager for the AIM (Accessible Instructional Materials) Consortium for CAST. She shared her expertise on copyright and IDEA with me while at Closing the Gap. When you want advice from an expert she is definitely the "Go-to Gal". (The interview is at the bottom of the post)

We have been bouncing around some opinions on interpretation of copyright here on the blog lately, and I have been sharing methods to get printed text into accessible formats. We have discussed scanning and converting to Mp3, using text to speech readers, Mp3 players, purchased software from Premier Literacy and Kurzweil. We have even explored the new DAISY save as...in MS Word (this past summer). We have had the DAISY Consortium folks jump into the discussion and I have found it all to be educational, informative and challenging to my thinking. There are still gaps in my understanding and I wanted some clarification if at all possible to keep me away from potential legal land mines.

While I was at Closing the Gap in Minneapolis, I sat in on several sessions that addressed RTI, NIMAS, AIM and UDL. In these sessions, there were always questions about how copyright law impacts the implementations mandated under IDEA 2004. Dr. Joy Zabala had some good things to say about it. I asked her if she would sit down with me a few minutes and share some of her thoughts with us. She happily agreed - thank you Dr. Joy!

Even though we are still a long way from having all the lines drawn and grey areas defined about who qualifies in certain instances, who is a "competent professional" to make decisions on who has a legitimate print disability, and what constitutes "fair use for education" in adapting print materials, we do have some experts that can guide us on what we need to consider and how to go about setting legal guidelines at a state level. Dr. Zabala is one of these we can go to for some guidance.

I am proud and honored to present my interview with Dr. Joy on this topic. We intended to go about 10 or 15 minutes, but as we got to discussing the topic, it stretched out a little longer - almost 30 minutes! I think you will find some good advice and information on where we are in the process of implementing access for print disabilities right now.

The interview is linked below, and I have also posted the interview on my new No Limits 2 Learning Website main page and under "Archive" where I will be storing all my audio files for free access anytime.

Interview With Dr. Joy Zabala on Copyright Issues and IDEA 2004 Mp3 - recorded at Closing the Gap Conference, 2008


Resources:

Dr. Joy Zabala's Web site

AIM Consortium/CAST

I hope you enjoy the interview. All the best to you!


Lon




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Giving Kids Relevant, Living Assistive Technology

I heard Steven Timmer talking about how difficult it was to get his son with a learning disability to bring his Alphasmart home with his homework on it. When he asked his son if he ever used it, he replied "I use it for a pillow." It came in a soft padded case and he would use it to rest is head on when he would lay down. At least the technology was helping him do something!
"If kids don't find a practical reason to use AT for something they want to do, they won't incorporate it into their world and use it," shared Steven Timmer, Ph.D. from Premier Literacy. How true.
(See yesterday, August 13, 08 post for more on Steven.)
Here is the thing I am beginning to wrap my brain around, and it is going to be a simple but profound distinction that will affect my AT services for years to come: There is assistive learning technology and there is assistive living technology. I shared this yesterday, but I wanted to talk about it a little more in light of what I do.
I have been giving learning technology to kids to help them at school and that is OK. But I also have been trying to give living technology to kids too early and they aren't ready for it. They aren't ready to incorporate it or understand the support it will give yet because they aren't even doing the things they need to do with it. I am also giving teachers and students learning technologies when what they need are living technology so they are prepared to move on with life and many of them haven't really received these tools yet and have no clue when or how to use them. They WILL use them if we give them the chance to implement them doing something that is important to them.
Instead of spending so much time with a software that prepares them to learn information to perform better on state assessments and try to get their scores up, maybe we need to focus more on helping them to independently take text and summarize it, and convert it to an Mp3 file they can listen to it. Oh, and by the way…let them select an article, story or other print media that is relevant to them.
I have some developmentally delayed and cognitive disabled students that are older - in high school that can use some of both kinds of AT to a certain point, but by high school, we should have given them the ability to use living technology for themselves so they can use it independently to access life. And you know what? If I teach them how to access life with living tools, I bet it will impact their ability to prep for those tests…hmmm just a thought.

Steven shared a great example of this when he told us about a fireman who had a dream to be Captain. He had some reading and writing disabilities and so he was given the tools at a local vocational rehab center to study for the exam that would qualify him for the job.
With the help of the center and the tools they used with him, he was able to take and pass the exam. He was promoted to the Captain position and held the job for 2 weeks before he was demoted again. Why? No one took into account that there would be job skills that he would have to have to do on a daily basis such as purchase orders, summary reports, evaluations, etc. He couldn't handle the amount of work at the speed he needed to do it. As the mountain piled up he got further behind until it was evident he couldn't handle it. If he had been given living technology he could use in his daily life to help him access text and convert it and write it, he might have been able to tackle the job. He still would have had to work harder and smarter than others without a disability, but if he wanted it bad enough, at least he could have done it.
I know I am talking about issues where we have students with print disabilities, but there are many of us with print disabilities. They need support at a daily life level, with a toolbox full of tools they can choose when they want to do the things that are important to them. These will be the tools they will use the rest of their lives. That would be the greatest gift we could give our students.

All the best to you!
Lon

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