TNT: Tackling New Technology

When our TLLP team arrived back at school in September, it felt a bit like Christmas; our equipment order from Bridges had arrived over the summer months and, as a result, we had lots of new 'toys' to keep us busy! There was only one problem: much like trying to operate a complicated new toy without without first reading the instructions, we found ourselves a little at a loss for how to begin setting up and using our new technology. (And as we all know, technology is only as smart as the people using it!) Luckily, we have lots of smart and knowledgeable people to help us along our way!

On September 26th, Allison, Deb and I met again with Kim from Bridges. She provided us with some very helpful PD on how to best begin using technology such as Grid 3, Look To Learn and 
ChooseIt 3. 

Following, is a snapshot of our learning and new information:

Look To Learn- Deb has been trialing with Josie and Jaycie in her class. Josie is very responsive to activities on Look To Learn and Deb is excited to continue to provide opportunities for Josie to use eye gaze skills.

GRID 3- has a range of uses, ranging from simple choice making to more elaborate writing activities. A good place to start for our students will be with "no fail" writing activities- i.e. silly story writing through choice making from a grid

A bonus of GRID 3 is that it has lots of ready made activities, which makes it very appealing! You can search for/access them by…..

1. At top of page go to grid explorer-  under menu click add- online grids

You can search for grids by topic, task or access mode

Once you add a grid set, you can either use it as is or edit it to your purpose.

Setting a student up to use eye gaze is quite simple: Go to 'access' and select eye gaze. After that, select calibration so the student can calibrate the screen

We looked at setting up the system so that students can hear rather than just view choices within grids. This is done by selecting, "speak the description" in access/ eye gaze . However, after trying this out, most of our eye gaze users are visual learners, who might be overwhelmed by extraneous auditory input.

There is also a Pointer mode rather than eye gaze. This is enabled by going to settings- pointer activation- highlighting speak description when highlighting lets your mouse go over without saying it

Today’s Learning:  we only need one school copy of Look to Learn and Eye Gaze as a school.  We can share these resources.

Our first priority is three classrooms able to use Grid 3 software.  Can be used:

• For eyegaze
• On a touch screen monitor with a laptop
• Same laptop could then connect to smartboard for collaborative classroom writing activities

Kim shared a fantastic website, Bridges Eye Gaze in the Classroom, that includes many helpful tips, explanations and instructions that we will provide links to via this blog.

Given that our use of eye gaze tech is in its infancy, we are hoping to connect with others who are using eye gaze technology. It may be helpful for our learning, and to the learning and development of our colleagues, to discuss, reflect on and explore eye gaze use within the province.

Some of the boards currently using eye gaze include,

London Catholic DSB ,Dufferin Peel, Peel DSB, TDSB, York Region, Brant Haldiman,

North Bay, Upper Canada Catholic, Ottawa

Currently, we are waiting for hardware capable of running our new tech. We will be talking with our administration and tech support, and determining a timeline in which this will occur.

We also decided to order 2 additional copies of Grid 3 as its uses and benefits are numerous and significant. We will be setting up our next release time so that we can explore and create a bank of activities for student learning/writing. As well, we will be discussing and outlining profiles/baselines of students to whom our project is most pertinent to. In this way, we hope to be able to effectively and clearly document growth over time. In addition, depicting a clear picture of students' writing both with and without adaptive technology, is expected to help communicate the very real need to revisit how to best serve the writing and language needs of students with complex physical and intellectual needs.