Video
Keeping Up With Technology and Student Needs
In this webcast Yue-Ting discusses the challenges and critical thinking needed to evaluate new technologies while making decisions based on student needs.
In this webcast Yue-Ting discusses the challenges and critical thinking needed to evaluate new technologies while making decisions based on student needs and the instructional task. She shares the challenges related to considerations in decision-making, assessment and justification in matching technology with students.
Presented by Yue-Ting Siu
Instructor: Yue-Ting Siu, Ph.D.
Length of time to complete: approximately 30 minutes
- Introduction
- Matching Technology to Your Student’s Needs
- When Should Assistive Technology Be Introduced?
- Keeping Current and Being Comfortable with Technology
- Technology and the Expanded Core Curriculum
- Problem Solving – The Hallmark of a Good TVI
SIU: Technology is difficult to keep up with. It’s sort of like, anytime you feel like you’ve learned something, there’s already something new that you need to know or that you don’t even know that you need to know. With TVIs in particular, the challenges are multi-layered because you not only have to understand what the classroom technology is, but the specialized technologies and often it’s understanding how to manipulate mainstream technologies to suit your student who is blind or visually impaired.
And then when that’s not enough, then it’s knowing what specialized technologies are out there and available. So, with the case loads, TVIs are always kind of stretched. You’re doing prep-time at home and then you also have to keep up with what the newest technology is — it’s really difficult.
Most teachers; it’s hard enough just to keep up with email, and I can understand that, but when you think about the affordances of technology and how that really facilitates that independent and timely access to information, this access to information — it’s not really a choice whether or not you keep up with technology.
Your students don’t have the luxury of that choice. They need you to be on top of what’s available and a lot of classroom teachers — they also have the luxury of having a peer next door, and most TVIs are itinerant; itinerant meaning traveling from school to school.
So, for example, I might have a student that I see 30 minutes a week and I’ll travel to the school, see the student for 30 minutes, and then I go to my next school. So I don’t get that same network, that same comradery that classroom teachers have, and I think that’s a really important missing piece. So TVIs lack that naturally built-in community of practice, I like to call it, so that professional learning community that really supports learning and professional development.
It’s really difficult for itinerant teachers, and it could be any kind of itinerant teacher, whether it’s a teacher of students with visual impairments or a teacher of students who are deaf or hard of hearing. Any teacher who is itinerant it’s going to be really difficult to keep up with that professional learning network because that community of practice isn’t just inherently there.
CHAPTER 2: Matching Technology to Your Student’s Needs
SIU: Understanding that when you make any sort of technology decision, it needs to be driven by how the technology influences that student learning and how that influences the content knowledge and making a decision about technology based on the intersection of all those things.
Rather than choosing a technology and fitting it into a student or a classroom context, it’s considering the classroom context and the student need first, and then making a decision about how the technology fits into that landscape.
NARRATOR: In a video clip we see a 4-year-old girl who is blind learning braille by using an iPad app called Exploring Braille with Madeline and Ruff. The iPad has been linked via Bluetooth to a refreshable braille display, allowing the girl to navigate the iPad screen and answer questions posed in the exercise.
SIU: When it comes to carrying out an assessment for assistive technology, or just technology in general, if you’re lucky enough you might have a local school for the blind that you might contact as a resource. Those are pretty far and few between and I would say that most people don’t have that immediate access.
Most school districts do have ITs, just information technology, and while those people might know the general technologies, they don’t understand the specialized needs and technology that is available for blind or visually impaired students.
So it usually does come down to the TVI to carry out that technology assessment. So what are the various features of technologies that help our students and once you understand the variety of features you can get from technology, whether it’s text to speech, refreshable braille display, magnification, but it’s understanding what the technology brings to the table and then finding the right fit for the student in the classroom.
CHAPTER 3: When Should Assistive Technology Be Introduced?
SIU: What age should technology be introduced? To me it’s, well, what about other kids? What are other kids using? Are other kids — are peers using social media or are peers using iPhones or iPads? What’s the classroom using? And I think the same standard should be the same for students who are blind or visually impaired.
There should be no lower or different standard for when they get access to technology, so for my students, I say as soon as possible; as soon as they can benefit from what technology brings to the table or as soon as they need to access the same information as their peers or in the classroom. That’s when technology should be introduced.
In the kindergarten classroom, it might just be getting used to playing around on an iPad. It might be just learning how to move your finger along a screen and to listen to what is begin spoken as your finger touches different things, because that’s what the peers are doing.
Then maybe further down the line it might be using that same iPad, but to access reading, writing, or research. But by that time that they need to use it for academic content, that student should already be familiar and comfortable with just playing around with an iPad. So I like to introduce technology as early as possible.
NARRATOR: Once again, we see video of the 4-year-old girl who is blind in her preschool classroom. She is working with her iPad and refreshable braille display.
By using the voice over accessibility option on her iPad, the navigation button on her refreshable braille display, and certain braille keystrokes or chords, she searches for the Exploring Braille app on her iPad.
SIU: Availability of technology really comes back to having a number of different tools available. So, having the lo-tech and then the hi-tech. When it comes to funding for technology, it’s actually not as much as a barrier anymore with better access to mainstream devices. So now instead of having to maybe apply for a district to pay for a device that costs $3000 to $5000 dollars, you can now ask for your district to pay for, let’s say, maybe an iPad or iPod and then pair that with a refreshable braille display.
In the past years I have become really impressed with how the American Printing House for the Blind, or APH, how they have really recognized the need for technology in the classroom and they facilitated access to it by including a number of different technologies on the quota system. So now you can a refreshable braille display, you can get a video magnifier, you can get a talking graphing calculator, so that’s been really helpful in putting technology into the hands of students.
CHAPTER 4: Keeping Current and Being Comfortable with Technology
SIU: I think this is another challenge for TVIs in keeping up with technology and maintaining technology is that you might learn about one device in school, but once you get out into the classroom things change, and things change very quickly depending on the classroom teacher for that year, or maybe it’s a difference between math content versus language arts content.
What you might know about one device; you might use it differently for different areas or with different teachers, so understanding how to use technology in a flexible manner is really helpful, and I think that is also one of the challenges in learning technology as well, is you can’t really learn it in a device-centric way. You have to learn it almost as a case-based way, so scenario-based learning or learning by case study.
It’s learning how to apply the technology and that’s really going to facilitate genuine implementation of the technology as a real tool, rather than an annoyance.
NARRATOR: In a video clip, an adolescent girl with Albinism is shown using the voice over accessibility tool on an iPad for the first time.
While the girl can read large print, knowing how to use voice over will be helpful for those times when her eyes become fatigued.
GIRL: This is crazy.
SIU: So I love the idea of having a bag of tricks because that’s really what it is in incorporating all the different uses of different technologies. So, for example, I have a high school student now who where when he goes into his English classroom, he has an English teacher who is using these very old grammar books. They are not available digitally and so what we’ve done there is he has a couple choices depending on the situation.
So he can either use a video magnifier or a CCTV, where he can place the book under a camera and it magnifies it onto a screen. Or if it’s something that he’s going to need to study later, he might take a photo of it so then it’s saved on his device and he can magnify it on his personal device, such as an iPad or laptop.
And I really emphasis that in having the bag of tools, is being able to — for students to choose their own learning media and be in charge of their own accessibility.
NARRATOR: The same adolescent girl with Albinism is now demonstrating how she can access, on her iPad, the same textbooks that her classmates use. She can alter the size of the pages and text via the touch screen.
She also demonstrates how she has used the camera on the iPad to take pictures of illustrations in textbooks, such as maps, which she can enlarge for later view if desired.
TEACHER: What did she say about it?
GIRL: That she loved it.
GIRL: So, um…this is – what is this? What? I bet this is for today. How to study…Yeah, this is probably for today.
TEACHER: It’s good, isn’t it? And you can tell when she put it in there because of the date. But can you make it full screen for us? There ya go. So that’s a Power Point. And what about the camera feature? Do you use it for things afar in your classroom?
GIRL: So I screenshoted, um, most of the thing and the other two that weren’t showing I just went to Dropbox and did them.
SIU: Another challenge for teachers, especially those who aren’t tech savvy, is being afraid of technology and it’s sort of like, “Oh, I’m not really sure about this” or “It makes me nervous” or “I’m scared to break it.” But your students can’t afford to have you be fearful, so I think when you can keep that larger goal in mind, maybe that could help overcome that fearfulness.
But it’s also knowing that there is always tech support out there and there is support out there can keep that larger goal in mind, maybe that could help overcome that fearfulness. And you don’t have to be the expert, so it’s being open to just trying different things and seeing how it fits your student’s needs because the beauty of being a TVI is that you are the expert in how blind students learn and you are the expert in understanding the differentiated learning needs.
And then it’s just taking a little step further to know what a student needs to get out of technology and being comfortable that you have that knowledge so that you can look at any technology and determine how that’s going to support your student.
I think technology is for everyone. So people always say, “Well Ting, you’re talking about all this hi-tech stuff. These are for that small portion of high-functioning academic students,” and I think that actually the beauty of all this great stuff in technology now, especially the access to mainstream stuff, is that even those kids with multiple disabilities; they can be using the same devices as the kid next door.
NARRATOR: In a video clip we see a young girl who has cortical visual impairment and is multiply disabled in her preschool classroom, along with some of her classmates. The girl and her friends are looking at an iPad that displays bright, colorful animations.
SIU: It’s great for a number of reasons. One, of course, is cost. It’s much cheaper to buy something like the iPad, which has built in accessibility features. It’s much more affordable than spending several thousand dollars on a specialized device. And yes, sometimes those specialized devices are necessary, but sometimes it’s not.
It’s not always needed and what is really nice is for two kids to play on the same device together, and maybe one student is in a wheelchair; maybe one student has multiple disabilities and their peer doesn’t, but either way it’s great when you can see kids playing with their peers.
CHAPTER 5: Technology and the Expanded Core Curriculum
SIU: TVIs are tasked with teaching the expanded core curriculum. So these are areas of instruction outside of the academic curriculum and TVIs recognize the need for differentiated instruction in various areas such as living skills, social skills, just adaptive activities – activities that students who are blind or visually impaired need more specific instruction in, and part of the expanded core is assistive technology, so it is learning how to use these technologies to access both mainstream information and devices, and also knowing how to use the specialized technology when needed.
Technology can definitely be just as much of a barrier as it can be a facilitator of bridging communications. So one example is I have a 3rd grade student right now where they’ve worked really hard on getting her materials to her in a digital format so she’s able to annotate her PDFs, she’s able to work in a Microsoft Word document; and yes, this is a 3rd grader, and so the classroom had set her up at a desktop computer in order to do all her work on the computer and she can use a screen magnification program to do that, and access all of the documents.
However, I walk into the room and I see her in the back corner on her computer and she’s got her accessible instructional materials, but the desktop computer itself has excluded her from the community of the classroom because all of her peers are working at their desks. So I really looked at that situation and it made my heart hurt a little bit to see her working in the corner away from her peers. In that case the technology really isolated her.
What we’re moving to is having her work on the iPad so that she can have that same access to digital material, but she can sit next to her peers to do that, and she can still communicate with her peers and work in group activities in order to fill out worksheets, and when they’re doing group reading, instead of sitting at her computer and reading on her desktop computer, she can read on her iPad right next to peers and engage with her peers, and in that way, it’s motivating for her to use her technology.
It’s motivating for her to use her iPad when she can sit with her classmates and they are all interested to see what she’s doing on her iPad and she’s not necessarily having to sit alone and by herself at the desktop computer. That’s a really nice example of leveraging what different types of devices can bring to the table and building that community around technology.
So the common core really challenges students to be thinkers, and to be critical thinkers, and what’s really great about having technology available to our students is it allows them that primary and independent access to information. Again, it all comes back to access to information, and this means both being able to get the information, but also to output the information as well.
NARRATOR: We are watching as a young girl who is blind and appears to be approximately 9-years-old works with her TVI to type and print a document for her teacher.
The girl has learned to pair the Bluetooth keyboard to her iPad. The iPad then sends the document to the printer.
SIU: So technology really facilitates that exchange of information, so when you talk about accessing the common core, it’s having that student be the primary receiver and giver of information, rather than having to rely on a secondary party to parse the information for them or to dictate information to somebody else to write it down.
CHAPTER 6: Problem Solving – The Hallmark of a Good TVI
SIU: Technology is really important for students, but for anyone who is considering a career in TVI or in the visual impairment field, I don’t think that should be a turn-off for teachers. A good TVI is open to new experiences and open to learning, and it’s an exciting career. Everyday is different; there’s always new challenges, but that also means there’s always new solutions too.
So, I think people who are creative thinkers; people who can think on their feet and are open to fresh experiences everyday they go to work – those people would love being a TVI. It’s a puzzle, so I love puzzles and it’s about problem solving and being able to have a problem and really manipulate it in your mind and in your hands and think about solving this accessibility issue, or communication issue.
I think to be a good TVI you don’t necessarily have to be tech savvy, but you have to be open to technology, and if you can just be open and adventurous, that’s really going to help your students. There’s always going to be new tech coming out and it’s just knowing where to find the resources, or knowing how to connect your students to the right resources, and helping your students find those resources for themselves.
So you might not need to be tech savvy, per say, but knowing where to find the support and help that you need; knowing who to contact or where to find those video tutorials; being a really good Googler is going to help.
NARRATOR: We see an example of a web resource for TVIs. In this case it is a site called TeachingVisuallyImpaired.com. The site has aggregated a number of online resources and webinars and compiled a list of links to organizations such as Paths to Literacy and Perkins School for the Blind, as well as many others.
SIU: So I think that is one of the biggest challenges of how do we really prepare TVIs to use technology in the field when it’s hard to anticipate what they’re going to need to know, what they’re going to need to use, and for these reasons, it’s really important to start that community of practice piece in pre-service.
So while teachers are in their pre-service programs, in their teacher prep programs, it’s really important to build those supports for them so that when they go out in the field, they already know how to use a listserv or they already know how and where to find resources online, and they already have a community of practice.
So when you have that community of practice, or COP for short, you have other people that are helping you build your toolkit. You have a teacher that says, “Hey, I just found this and I tried it with this student and it worked really well!” Or you might have another teacher that says, “Yeah, I’m also using that same technology but it’s not working in this application, so how can I problem solve that.”
So together you’re building that toolkit and you are not having to do that alone, and that kind of leads to the second dimension of a COP is that solve that.” So together you’re building that toolkit and you are not having to do that alone, and that community piece. It’s really building that community where you’re exchanging information and sometimes you might seeking information and people provide it, and other times you might be the person providing the information.
What’s really nice about that community piece is you kind of check in with your community and when you don’t need to, you just maintain and keep going.
Interested in learning more? Sign up for Yue-Ting Siu’s online class “Multimedia in the Modern Classroom: Assistive Technology for Students with Visual Impairments” starting August 3rd. http://www.perkinselearning.org/earn-credits/online-class/multimedia-in-the-modern-classroom-assistive-technology-students-visual-impairments
