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12.7.23 AEM and Universal Tools for Transition with Sarah Statham and Lon Thornberg

12.7.23 AEM and Universal Tools for Transition with Sarah Statham and Lon Thornberg



Session #3 AEM Across the Lifespan with OTAP
Accessible Educational Materials Virtual Mini-Conference
The Transition IEP contains post-secondary goals in education, training, employment, and independent living. This session will share universal tech tools for transition that support and accommodate transition age students on the journey to reaching their post-secondary goals. This session will also highlight collaborative and coordinated relationships between students, educators, specialist’s and outside agencies that can be enhanced by the understanding of student’s use and past history with AEM & AT.
Creative Commons Attribution - Non-Commercial - No Derivatives
Link to SMORE: https://www.smore.com/thfxw
Welcome uh to aim across the lifespan a series by uh otap and the Oregon aim cohort partnership uh we are uh pleased to welcome our next guest uh the universal Tech tools for adulting um it is a pilot project Laur laon thornberg and Sarah stum are going to be uh

Leading us through this conversation uh all of the archives uh the recordings will be put into the Oar Commons open educational resources uh there is an open Oregon open Learning Hub and under that Hub are accessible educ accessible educational materials group this is where our resources for

Transition and all of the resources that we are amassing our uh we have handouts for today all handouts Chandra has posted that link if you have um uh if you have not registered it's not too late to do that to receive credit so Chandra will post that link I'm going to

Stop talking because what they really want to hear uh is a presentation about transition and resources so I'm going to mute myself and invite the two of you to talk to us welcome thank you Deb um we're going to go to the next slide that shows uh Sarah I presenters I wanted to

Introduce myself I I used to be an assisted technology specialist with Inter Mountain ESD for regional programs in the state and I was part of our um Think Tank working group uh that met uh Statewide and um this was kind of a delight for me because Sarah and I are

Both on the Oregon technical transition technical assistance Network team as tnfs which are transition Network facilitators and Sarah started looking at Universal tools and wanted to develop something in her school district regions and uh since I had a background of assisted technology I jumped in to

Support her but this is really her baby and I carry loose which we'll talk about with at Labs helped as well we were kind of advisers and supporters for Sarah's project so I'm going to turn it over to Sarah let her introduce a little bit more about herself I'm over in eastern

Oregon and she's over in M MMA County area hi everybody uh yep my name is Sarah stum I'm a transition Network facilitator and um there are eight of us across the state and my counties are M Loma Washington Columbia and clat sub counties and um this did start as a I

Would call it a curiosity project um and during the pandemic looking for teachers kept asking for ways uh to just do things a little differently with some of their students um and so I started looking around and this sort of evolved from there um so we're pleased to talk

About this with you today um Lon shared a little bit about his role I come at this as a former teacher but I feel like I'm always a teacher um I taught for over 20 years and the last half of my career was um in transition education

For students 18 to 21 in the um Centennial School District uh so that's where I come from in regards to this work all right um like I said we are part of a broader Network Lon and I are one of uh or two of eight and we wanted to make

Sure uh because I'm think that there are folks from across the state of Oregon with us today that if you have questions in regard in regards to um transition services and and education in the in your school districts um this is the list of all the tnfs across the state

And how to reach all of us um and it's a really marvelous group of people that I think I can say that Lana and I both feel very fortunate to get to work with yeah um this is the uh just a slide about the Community Vision at lab um we

Had the privilege of uh collaborating with Carrie Loose as we got started with this project uh if you don't know Community Visions at lab it's uh housed here in Portland and is uh a pretty remarkable resource they're a really unique organization and I would highly recommend checking them out

Um our objectives for today we're going to just give you some information about Universal Tech tools and those that might apply to aim and we're going to talk about the uh Tans um our web page that we developed we're going to share some resources um and we'll talk about documenting this in

The IEP um for uh for folks as well um so Universal Tech tools these are of course tools that are used by uh for with for anybody with a broad range of skills and ages um they're readily available they're simple to set up you don't need any specialized training and

They're free or low cost um I think the key thing is that they're easily and readily available um and uh for anyone so there's no uh sometimes we would we've been asked questions around assessments or things in regards to that for students to be able to access these

Um tools and and these this is like your starting point if you see something this is your uh that a student needs some assistance with or to make them more independent um this is your starting point so um I just want to be clear on

That I'm not a um I am not a any sort of uh assisted Tech provider um this really is a curiosity for me and looking for ways for to help teachers with their students to get them started and going and I'll add on to that that uh when it

Says free and low cost when I did do um assessments and work with Specialists and students um teachers really needed free and low cost tools I mean we we had budgets for things but especially when they were starting out assessing what might what might work for a student it

Was nice to have some free opportunities to access some things that could be tested and tried that are Universal tools anyone could use and so that's kind of where we came from this this slides an example of some of the a toolbox and some things that we will be

Highlighting um Bookshare is obviously for aim a huge huge piece of um accessing digital content for curriculum and books so we plug that one in here as well but it's not it's more for you than it is on our website because we know that that is limited to who can access

It based on their disability um most of these examples on here I'm assuming most folks are quite familiar with uh you should be able to look at these pictures and be like oh I know exactly what that is um especially in this day and age so again it's Universal accessible to

Anyone um so what we this is a a visual that we use to think about how technology can help bridge the gap so when um a teacher comes to us and is talking about or struggling with a like a certain situation with a student so we

Want to look at what the student can do what are they doing right now what is the task that they want to be able to do and what's the Gap um where is the breakdown happening and what uh easily accessible tools or technology could be available to help bridge that Gap so the

Student again the whole goal is to help them become more independent um in the environment that they are uh working in and so I thought I think this visual is a nice um a nice one to use to show how we really want to bridge that Gap Lan do

You want to talk to the set tool sure so we put a link to set down there student environment task and tools it's a really nice tool and that has a hyperlink to the area that has a bundle of all of the documents and assessments and profiles

And ways you can um really really in depth uh get into an in depth assessment and um facilitation tool is great uh the thing about what we were doing at this point was for teachers as a first jumping off point so we decided Ed to stay away from things that would be

Assessments and indepth tools that would need a specialist to work with them but this just know what we're sharing with you would be the first point of access for teachers to be able to start looking at tools okay so we're going to show you some examples um these are the four

Categories that um we broke things down into so you have school and college daily living preemployment and employment um while also knowing that so many of the tools that we explored for these different topic areas overlap there you know we all use a Google Calendar for school daily living

Employment all the things so these These are tools well yes we broke them down into different um these different categories there's so much overlap in many of them um so these are the different categories that we put things into um and oh I'm G to show you I'm G

To show you in a little bit but um there's these are the images that you see throughout the website the Google site that we developed um to show people to to keep it consistent so people knew what they were looking at and I'm GNA chime in before you Chang can if you can

Go back y I'll go back y to the icons um when we do IEPs postsecondary goals that we do that are overall goals for what they want to achieve when they exit services are bundled kind of around um College you know training Education and Training could be certifications um then also under

Employment and then also when appropriate under daily living we also put pre-employment in because we work with vocational rehabil ation a lot and there are five pre-employment transition Services they deliver and there's a lot of overlap as far as the content and and things within pre-employment that are

Skills that are developed with our students before they exit and so we put that one in there too so we uh asked a lot of teachers uh in these four different categories what do they see as the Gap and so that's what you see on the left hand side um

When we so when we ask them in regards to school and college what do you see as the Gap where students um what you know what they can do versus what they want to do and um they identified all sorts of things like spelling or being slow at

Typing um student is visually impaired needing help with note taking resistance to writing hand fatigue um something maybe with motor skills uh time management due dates um and so we took that information and our goal was to then go out and look look for those Easy

Universal Tech tools to um then we put this information onto the website and our goal really was to create a starting point for teachers this is was not meant to be uh to give you all the information to give you detailed examples of how something works it was meant to be very

Like five minutes or less let's make this quick to give you just that taste of what it what something is what a tool is and maybe it would work for um for your students so and what you'll see here so this is just a simple example

That we all are very familiar with I would think um that in Google Docs you can use voice typing that microphone icon and instead of uh typing in uh a paper for into a document maybe you use your voice to put it into the document and while most people have experience

With this some people it's still unfamiliar they're unfamiliar with it and so this video is one that's on the website um and I like you could see I'm just going to show you just a little bit of it but you'll see it's very short and to the point with Google Docs using the

Keyboard isn't your only option to add text you can also just talk and have Google transcribe the words for you you can use this feature to transcribe meetings and audio recordings or simply when you want to write faster than you can type so you can see this is a video that

Is less than three minutes it gets to the point um just like they said it might help you if you can talk faster than you can type which I have known many students that could talk a whole lot faster than they could type um and this was a really helpful tool and again

Just to get a snippet of what um what that uh tool is with Google Docs using the keybo there we go um the next topic that we looked at were again pre-employment um and so we asked Educators what's the Gap that they see they talked about uh Speech and communication organization

Confidence um being able to reduce anxiety process processing speed um presentations um social stories and so those were you know they looked at what the student can do versus what they wanted to be able to do and um so what could we use to fill in the

Gap and one example here that we use is uh pello and so uh this is an app that you can use and our really our goal was to have things be free or lowc cost and so this day and age things less than $20 they're low cost and um so this is an

Example of where Pell was used by a student um to uh share in an interview and also I'll share this with you my name is Alex thank you for inviting me to the interview today you sent me some questions ahead of time and I would like to answer those

Now you asked why do I want this job I want to work here at the library because I love books reading and meeting new people you asked what skills I bring to this job I volunteered last summer at the library you can see how strong I am

Here so this is a show showing you how Pell could be used uh to help a student in an interview showcasing um work that they may have done at an internship and again it's not giving you a whole lot of information and and you'll have to do

Your own like work in order to um really learn how to use the app but it's showing you what what is possible um and in using this one and then on the website which we'll show you in a minute there are lots of other examples

So our next topic area was the area of employment again we asked teachers what did they see as a gap um needing things like how long till my next break uh how long to complete something learning the schedule uh learning one is payday that's an important one we all

Like to know uh time management things like when to leave for the bus what time to be at work um helping with things to be helping to have things be visual um self-regulating themselves and so again we looked at what they can do and what the Gap is and

So like this is an example of using a timer because you can see there's a lot of they brought teachers brought to our attention a lot of things around time management um and so there are some videos that I'll show you that talk about the basics right Google Calendar

App I know that's the one I use all the time um and then using timers or using timers on and alarms on your watch as a reminder to help you with your time management skills then the last area that we looked at were daily living um and so again

Asking teachers what they saw as a gap and they identified things like um anything that needs task analysis reading skills organization cooking following a recipe to-do lists motivation um you can start to see especially as now we're at the the last topic area there are a lot of overlap

Right reading skills they identified in daily living but that's also something that could come up in um in work or in your um in your school or college needs um staying on track in organization important for daily living but also in those other areas as well and so here's an example and

There's a there's a video I'm not going to show it but it's about uh the can plan app which uh you can set up and it explains to you it shows you um like okay you need to know how to make your own coffee there you go you can click on

That and it shows you it breaks it down the six steps to making your coffee uh how to do the dishes B you know how to make a baked salmon two steps that seems a little short but um you know then it can be tailored to the student and again

It's just showing folks what's available um to anyone and how to tailor it to get a student started to increase their independence so I want to show you our Google site um so this I say that this website is always under construction because this page is definitely a constant work

In progress as we all know with technology it's ever evolving never ending always changing um and so sometimes if someone shares a new resource or tool with me I might add it to this page um I don't think I could ever say that anything technology related is ever

Finished so here's what it looks like um you can see we have our different categories and so when a teacher goes and looks here um we kind of broke things down into some different areas to try to just streamline things some for uh for teachers and so you can see under each

There is I need to fix that one um it's just uh gives you very short very basic information and again we sought out informative yet short videos to explain um what it is that they're looking at yeah had one of our priorities was to not overwhelm the eyes so when a teacher

Went somewhere it was very icon friendly large text not a lot of little print and things they have to Wade through visually so that I feel like we've accomplished that I think we I think so I think so um so again you can just see different things and if something had a

Fee we really tried to be upfront with that um and here are some other examples um this has been a fun one using QR codes around a workplace is a really cool idea to help students uh or employees with what are the tasks that need to be

Done um but as you can see like there's always space for more there's like what's the next thing that we could add in here that's simple um and would be helpful I'll put the link to uh our Google site in the in the chat but I think it's also in the presentation as

Well all right Lon there if you want you can just scroll I'll just give you voice directions okay go back up yeah so this is our Oregon transition Education website and it has at the top different areas that you can check out but this is the resources page that's that uh

Document looking one so if you scroll down um there are again large icon kind of domains within transition so at the top there uh Education and Training if you look there's things you can find under College resources Equity education resources training Etc and then Employment list the things there we

Wanted you to get the site because let's go to employment we'll just look at one so you view resources scrolling down there's career exploration so let's stop there so if you were to look at those resources and you have screen readers for um low vision and blind you have

Um text that's a a talking word processor kind of thing or you can use digital um speech output you could go to any of these websites and use your tools so what we wanted to do is give you some toolkit resources that you can use your tools rather than us telling you and

Talking about the tools we wanted to give you the resource to use the tools so scrolling down this one um there's careers and stem um alcohol and food server permits um the benefits are going to work and there's some sped transition tools if we go back uh to the ne last

Page you all should know that this website the transition oregon.org website uh was developed based off of the Google site that I showed you where there were the universal Tech tools um we developed the Google site during the pandemic and then um and now we the professionals have shown up to help uh

Make it uh look really nice and very accessible and all the things yeah I'm proud of Sarah she's during the pandemic she rolled up her sleeves and really did a lot of web page designed with Google Docs and Google websites and she's turned into a real

Pro added um let's go down this page the career exploration If U sorry did you want to go back to that one sorry yeah go to employment and just let's scroll down a little more just to see the topics there's work evaluations are important because a student can can be evaluated

When they go out on an internship by uh a employer and they can have goals and those can be digital documents that they can um access and and be able to use and scrolling down a little more interest inventories are important because when we're exploring um different preferences

Interest needs and strengths of students these are let's click on that view resources real quick there um there's um nice uh Explorer work there's things that would give you a skills matcher if you go down I think there's some that like this one answering a few quick

Questions they learn if you they could do a visual one if you see like a person working out planting a tree in the forest and then there's another picture of a person um working on a computer in an office which would you like and they

Click on it then it goes to the next one and so on so at the end it tabulates what your popular um choices were as far as what you want okay we'll go back and keep going back we'll go to the main yeah and just scrolling down there's Independent Living education training self-determination

Communication other resources so that's all I'm going to spend time on on this page but this is our transition Oregon website please take advantage of it because there's some great resources and if we go back to our SL slide I we won't go there but when I was researching for preparing when Deborah

Asked us to do this I looked on um there was an aim presentation theme example some templates it's was from Cynthia Curry the cast director and it has it's a great U slide deck of her presentation and it has some pieces around summary of performance and if you're not familiar

With that the SOP the summary performance is something that is a document that goes with the student when they exit that gives information out of the IEP and can include accommodations and modifications they could use with a service coordinator or a personal agent that supports them a job coach a job

Developer an employer so it's a really important area to know about we'll go to the next slide so uh I don't think how are we doing time wise I don't know do we have enough time okay so both of these I am I have to say I'm I'm not super familiar with

Them yet because I'm not teaching from them I'm a technical assistant for teachers but um Lam at ESD down in Salem um they have sponsored the the contract that has the person who works to develop the Oregon employability skills curriculum and it has badges there's badges under different

Employability skills and um let's go up to the menu up there and I probably need to move my this which one on okay um let's go to student learner for a minute oh it's coming it's not we don't have it yet okay oh it isn't so I wish I

Had the picture of the badges there's domains and um they can learn about an employability skill at school and as all the curriculum and videos to watch and if they do the tasks and the assignments they can earn a badge for that area of that domain and then there's a

Opportunity for them to go out into the work place and have an employer who has been preset up to have students come through and do an internship to practice that skill and if they demonstrate they can do it out in the field they get another badge that's the work based

Employer field badge so so um it's it's a really nice curriculum and I would highly recommend checking it out if you're into that and what you do is you sign up and you get on a mail list that sends you the updates and information and then you're given a link so that you

Can download the entire curriculum and access it online and the videos to use with your students okay we'll go back to the slide and then this other one is newer this is career connected learning and um there's areas across the top for different partners um if we go to Educators and then scroll

Down this has a a short video about our reason why we believe in career connected learning and having work-based learning and career connected learning where a student is actually practicing what they're doing is important scrolling on down I'm keep going there's the resources area we won't go there but

You can see they have lessons and they have videos I went to a presentation on this where they said there's a high school level and there's a middle school level and they people are the teachers using it are saying the middle School level is the one that's more vibrant and

Active and more things going on at videos that and they do videos where they have really cool people out in the field talking about what they do and so it's really a nice curricul okay so there's the links to those if you want to explore that more and and

Then there's a a PDF of this slide deck in the folder and so all the links should be live in that for you all as well okay I'll turn it back to Sarah okay so we wanted to finish with talking about where to document some of this

Information um in an IEP uh Lon and I do a lot of work with uh agencies that may Provide support in a variety of ways to students uh some before they leave school services uh some after they leave school services but um we are we are encouraging those

Agencies to request to look at a student's IEP because it's full of very important and useful information um and we want to encourage uh all of you and any Educators you might work with to make sure to include uh Universal Tech tools that a student finds success with in their IEPs um you

You could list that information when you're listing a student's overall strengths and interests and preferences um you know maybe a strength is that they uh know how to independently use a Google Calendar to you know have reminders so that they're on time to things or a preference could be that

They use um Google Voice to dictate uh information or papers um or things like that to but to please include that information here um because again we are encouraging outside agencies to um use the students IEP to get to know them better to learn about what's worked what

Hasn't worked um it really is such an important document full of such important information um that we want to make sure it goes there because we have learned that sometimes things that students have found success within school it it isn't getting that information is not getting passed on to the agencies that are

Supporting them next and um valuable time can be lost and a student may have to do another assessment that maybe they've already done before and if we could just make sure we include all that information here it it could help move things along um with all the things that

Are going to happen in their next phase of Life uh and then the Educators La already mentioned the um summary of performance that's done when a student is um going to exit the school system including again those Universal Tech tools that uh students find success with success with in that document can also

Be really very helpful um you can also include this information by clicking the uh if it's if it's technology related clicking the yes in the um assist of Technology device um and then again just including that information it's just one more spot to bring it to someone's attention that

Hey this this is a uh Tech Tool that the student uses and has found success with um you know go read more and that's all we have for you today so thank you so much for taking the time I think that we were going to

Make some time here at the end to answer any questions that might have come up for anyone during this presentation yeah this is our contact information uh if you need to know more about our transition technical assistance Network even if you forget about that map and you can

Contact either of us and say I live in U Medford or I'm over clam Falls who do I talk to um we we have a tight relationship with all of our other tnfs in the state and uh I I might say because we do have a minute here that

We're excited that Oregon developmental Disability Services ODS has um funding Federal funding arpa funding that they are offering in Grants and people right now can go on Oregon buys and apply and put in a proposal for using those funds and they have a huge area in the area of transition Youth and

Employment with with students with developmental disabilities and if you have any connection with those and you want to write something you can um the state did use some of those funds to uh provide funding for our transition technical assistance Network and we have Regional employment Specialists that that work with

Adults uh with developmental disabilities and they work with us as part of our larger tan and uh so we have developmental disabilities fundings Federal funding helping fund what we do and we're proud of that and we we have some exciting things we're working on for the next two years with that

Funding and I guess that really wraps it up really really wraps it up deah well thank you both for being here Lon and uh Sarah uh some wonderful information you know as we talk about aim uh of course it's important U no matter what you call it accessible educational materials while we're in

School when we get out in life accessible educational materials means that you need to know how to read a job application and you need to uh know to how to access your newspaper for uh life um Life Education once you get uh out of school so accessibility is important

Across the lifespan we started this morning with conversations conversations about early childhood and we know that we have to prepare our kids for when they leave our nest

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