ATIA 2013 Takeaways

I’ve been home a little over a week now from ATIA, and am still on an AT high. I remember feeling this way coming home from summer camp when I was a teenager—happy, inspired, and ready to spread the news of everything I learned. It’s always great to learn about the actual tools, but my biggest takeaway was more about collaboration.
 
I think it is easy to feel very isolated as an AT Specialist. For most of us, we aren’t sitting eating lunch with the other AT Specialists or chatting as we walk to our cars at the end of the day. We have to actually work a little harder to collaborate with others in our field. We are fortunate though that there are tons of awesome people in the Assistive Technology world who like to share their knowledge. At ATIA, I was lucky enough to chat with some of the QIAT leadership team, who are leaders in our field. Although I recognized their names from the QIAT listserv, I had never met them in person. It felt like I was meeting the president! Talk about an inspirational group! From that conversation and others at ATIA, I have come to my biggest takeaway—Take advantage of the resources that are out there in the AT field. I will make time to read all those QIAT listserv emails, read blogs of others in the AT field, and learn from my co-workers, as well as try to be a resource for others. It is give and take. For anyone not already on the QIAT list, it has been a huge support for me and is an easy place to access really knowledgeable people. Although you will get lots of emails each day, it is an invaluable (and free) resource.

Okay, on to the tools. A couple of things from the exhibit hall and sessions that caught my eye:

1. I was very impressed with the Clicker apps--Clicker Docs and Clicker Sentences. They are very similar to Clicker 6—clean interface, simple to use. Clicker Docs is a talking word process with word prediction and word banks. Clicker Sentences helps emerging writers using Clicker grids. Bonus: These apps work with Clicker 6, so activities you created in Clicker 6 will run on the apps, and vice versa.
2.  I have been on a quest to beef up my evaluation skills in the area of reading. I was very happy to learn about PAR (Protocol for Accommodations in Reading) created by Denise DeCoste and Linda Bastiani Wilson in conjunction with Don Johnston. This is an assessment tool that helps an evaluator determine the most appropriate reading accommodations for students, based on data. Bonus: Free download from their website. I’ll definitely be reading through this over the next week or so. http://www.donjohnston.com/products/par/index.html 
3. I also learned a little more about Diigo.com, a website I had heard about but never really explored. Diigo.com is a social bookmarking tool that allows users to collect info on the Internet. You can bookmark web pages, highlight text on a webpage, and create sticky notes, etc. This could be a super useful tool for teachers to find web sites for their students on a specific topic to narrow down the vast information found on the internet. Bonus: It is all on the cloud, so you can access anywhere. 

What a great conference!

FREE Clicker Presentation! November 16, 2010

FREE Training session – Clicker from Crick Software


When: Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Where: Advancing Opportunities, 1005 Whitehead Rd Ext, Ewing, NJ 08638 (For directions, visit our website)
Time: 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Presenter: Deborah Yergeau

SPACE IS LIMITED – email today to reserve your spot.
mmarotta@advopps.org


The use of technology can encourage even the most reluctant readers and writers in your classroom, but some students need more than encouragement to achieve literacy success. This session will focus on how Clicker creates more independent and engaged readers and writers.

Participants will explore Clicker’s multimedia features, which enable teachers and students to create and use interactive teaching and learning materials such as animated sentence building activities, electronic books, and ‘hot spot’ environments. These resources can include text, images, sounds, and video, and the use of pop-up grids allows all users to add their own recorded sounds and narrations. Students can build sentences through word sequencing, or use more complex writing frames to scaffold extended writing. At all levels, students are supported by realistic speech, enabling them not only to hear what they have written, but also to listen to words before they select them.

As well as the highly detailed educational picture collection that comes with Clicker, teachers and students can use their own pictures or other ready-made picture libraries. Words can also be brought to life with the Clicker Animations library. The animated pictures greatly enhance reading comprehension activities for struggling students and English language learners.

From basic word order and sentence structure to extended writing, session participants will discover how Clicker addresses Universal Design for Learning principles to provide reading and writing support for all students. Clicker activities support a variety of learning styles, particularly benefiting audio/visual learners, and are also highly motivating for students with a range of differing educational needs. This session will demonstrate how easy it is to create activities that develop strong literacy skills across the curriculum for the diverse learners in today’s inclusive classrooms.