um but welcome to leveling the playing field with assist of technology uh I'm first wanted to uh introduce a couple people and thank uh CPAC um I don't know i'm still fairly new to the district it's been about a year and a half believe it or not it's only it's only
been about that long uh so thank you all for having me hopefully uh you'll you'll keep me until I retire we'll see how we do uh on the call with me already I have Mr foglio you want to say hi Chris oh you muted yourself again uh he does
not look like his pitcher this was his winter beard in the picture now he's going for his summer look you know his slim slim down look uh and and you know possibly jumping on later i know she was busy today and and we actually just did some interviews together uh at at you know she just left the high school at
5:00 helena Bronco hopefully will will pop on uh but she is our K to5 director of student services chris is our 6 through 12 um director of student services uh they deal you know with with CPAC much more our students with special needs uh our our counseling departments
our nurses uh those two do a lot of work so uh I want to give a lot of props to them and and thank them for being here so in case I get in over my head uh they can they can jump in and and add their two cents as well uh I have at the bottom I I wanted to try to encourage
everyone uh to if you haven't joined CPAC already I have a link there at the bottom to their website uh well it's it's our website but we have a lot of their information there that QR code and that uh follow us on Facebook link will take you to join and follow their
Facebook page uh and I I encourage you to do that so if you have a student with special needs or you're interested um you know in in understanding more about that community uh you know please follow them cpac does a lot of really great stuff
and a lot we they help sponsor a lot of these parent universities which we're doing tonight uh tonight we're doing specifically assist of technology um but they've this is probably the orth event that you've you've uh arranged this year so uh you know a big shout out to CPAC
for putting all this together and um getting in touch with me and and you know I'm really glad to help and and you know talk and and and show some of the things that we're doing in the school district to help our parents and and our students so uh let me go to the next one here so I'm going
to jump in and again if if you have questions I'll I'll show you how we're going to break up the agenda for tonight but one thing I wanted to share is this quote that has always kind of stuck with me uh that for people without disabilities technology makes things easier for people with disabilities technology makes things possible i I
learned very early in my career even in high school um I I mean I've always liked technology you know my mom's online she could tell you that I I had a Commodore 64 we started typing when I was like 70 years old in the 80s uh and so I always knew I like technology uh
when I put two and two together uh in high school my uh high school sweetheart her mother had uh mus um multiple sclerosis and so she was wheelchair bound she could not use her hands um and uh through some uh some commissions and
and and donations she was able to get and I I helped her install in her house what is you know today would be more of like an an Alexa or a Siri um and and so she could you know command the lights to come on and and turn on the TV and turn on her computer and this was in like
1995 that I helped her set that up uh and so I knew then like wow this is really great that technology can help someone with this kind of severe disability and so I I knew from that point on this would be something I'd want to do so in 2007 when I I started
in education I was like "Oh this is this is going to be awesome this is what I was made for." So uh is there's some mundane things I get to do in technology like our internet and phones and security cameras but but helping students is is you know the the thing that I was most excited about and
helping students with opportunities with technology and learning with technology and that students with disabilities our gened students um just just everybody was something that I knew I always wanted to do so I always like to share this quote um you know because I think it's really at the root of what we're
doing here in in education but today's agenda the real reason why you're here uh I I thought it would be e I was trying to think of like well how would I organize this and break this uh up so people could kind of follow along uh and I thought it'd be good if we start with well here's some tools that
we're currently using and we've used for a while in the district then I thought I might share a couple of tools that we've started trying out to see well how does this help students and what does it look like in our classrooms uh and then I thought I could kind of like pull back the curtain and say "Here's what I think's going to happen in the next you
know two to five years." And and so that's me guessing at some of these technologies i'll pull out my crystal ball later if that helps you out um but if you want I I I'll kind of stop after each section and if people have some some questions I can answer them then and then I'll have a Q&A at the end i'm I'm you know glad to answer anything I
can i I had a reminder on the flyer that you know please try not if you're going to ask a specific question try not to ask anything that's that would personally identify your student and you know keep your personal data personal but but again I'm I'm always glad to talk about assist of technology so thanks for joining us today and I'm
going to I'm going to jump right in so some things that we are currently using the first and foremost I I couldn't go very far without talking about Chromebooks uh long ago we had decided to be a onetoone district uh a lot of districts went this way when
Chromebooks started coming out in you know 2011 2012 and Google was at the time offering lots of free tools uh it made it so compelling that I think the last time I saw a statistic about 80% of New Jersey schools were Google for education schools um and there's there's
a lot of reasons for that the this is some some kind of current Chromebook accessibility features but we have 2,200 Chromebooks in the district so they're in our kindergarten classrooms our first grade rooms our middle school our high school um we we pretty much have a Chromebook for every child and they go
home starting in in sixth grade in K to five in some instances for for a special need we'll start sending them home you know I've seen first and second graders that are that are taking them home know um and and you know Chromebooks have a lot of built-in features um you're going
to hear me toss around uh the the phrase universal design for learning i'll try not to say that too much cuz it's a mouthful but I I like tools that and again going going back to this theory um there's tools that help all students uh it just so happens that there's some
tools that help students with special needs even more so a lot of times when I'm when I'm choosing tech and again you guys chose Chromebooks way before I got here um I like tools that all students can use and and there's a use for and so you can see you know just in some of
these screenshots I put in here and these bullets that I threw in here and this is not a comprehensive list um these are just some of the biggest features that we use in the district uh you know kids can choose you know some of their own tools that they want to enable um so resizing actually resizing the
cursor is a popular one when we're helping students you know day-to-day it's not students with special needs that are the only ones resizing their cursor i I don't know if you can see on the screen my cursor is giant because I have bad eyes um you know so a lot of students do that uh Chromebooks have builtin a lot of built-in text to speech
um there's a couple versions the Chrome Fox one is meant more for visual impairment and reads every single menu and and everything else but then uh recently they added the select to speak uh I'm going to talk more about you know some text to speech options in a bit but Chrome really has started just
integrating that you know flat out uh dictation and speech to text that's kind of built into Google Workspace anyways Google Docs the screen magnifier has been a real benefit for a student student some of our students with visual impairments because you know if they
have some vision they can they can customize some things on their own i put at the the bottom bullet uh we have some students with visual impairments that we just gave them a large format Chromebook so they have a 14 or 15 inch Chromebook that's touchscreen and they can literally pinch and zoom to see what
they need to see on the screen um on screen keyboards automatic clicks uh the the live captions is somewhat new that that the students can just enable live captions so anything it sees and hears the the Chromebook will already caption much like our our Zoom is tonight so uh
th this makes the Chromebook just an ideal device to start with so uh especially when we talk about students wanting to to be with their peers a least restrictive environment um that they want to they want to feel normal they want the normal experience and they want to access the curriculum the way
everyone else accesses the curriculum so when we can provide a tool like this that all students have um it it doesn't call out a special needs student um because they they're using the exact same devices appear right next to them uh in a lot of cases so I saw there were
there were a couple chats chris are you tracking some of those let me see if there's Oh the chat there's no chats there's people joining so Helena joined Actually that's the popups I'm seeing oh Helena did you want to say hello maybe she doesn't want to say hello
she may still be getting her uh mic stuff set up yeah I was talking about people with families in 7 p.m being a magic time so it might be that for So uh you know one of our big major tools uh is Chromebooks i have at the end of this by the way uh you know if people do have
a lot of questions I I put as one of my last slides links to other resources so if you want to do a deeper dive tomorrow I'm going to put this presentation uh on the CPAC page the parent university page uh and and then also the recording but people can follow some of these links if
they want to do a deeper dive into you know Chromebook accessories and uh I'm sorry accessibility and some of the other you know inclusive websites that uh you know we use day-to-day in in school and for assist of technology you
know but number one I I couldn't go far without talking about Chromebooks and and how accessible they have become you know in the early days you know 2011 12 13 it had you know very few features and as time went on Google just kept adding
and adding and adding uh I you know I' I'd like to think they did that of their own accord but I'm going to talk about iPads later and and certainly I'm sure Apple you know pushed them to to kind of keep up and have some of these tools so Chromebooks Uh this one I I wanted to kind of talk
about augmentative alternative communication AAC's as we call them uh and I didn't want to go far without talking about this experience that Chris and I had at Texo this year uh one of the keynote speakers was was this person Jordan Zimmerman uh and she was just
outstanding to to to hear and see uh so Jordan went to school in Ohio and and I might beat up on Ohio a little bit this so if there's anyone from Ohio I'm really sorry uh but Jordan uh is a person she she likes to say non-speaking she doesn't she doesn't like the phrase
non-verbal but she is non-speaking with autism uh and presented to 600 administrators 6 or 700 people in the room um she went to school in Ohio and talked about her experience that she didn't have a very inclusive experience so she was often excluded because she
was non-speaking um and and had trouble you know getting like access to language and access to the curriculum access to to being in a general ed classroom with her peers uh until finally when uh I think it was
Chris you can correct me i think it was 2015 or 2016 in Ohio they finally got her an iPad for her augmentative alternative communication and all of a sudden she she had a voice she could express herself she had more access to
language um the the part I beat up on Ohio for is that iPads came out in 2010 like she could have had access to this much sooner and and it wasn't until she was 16 or 17 in high school that she finally got you know some of the tools that were really necessary so in our
district in Puquanic you know we have even in some of our preschool classrooms for preschool disabled we have some three and four-year-olds uh that if they are non-verbal our speech therapists will help them um you know be able to access you know simpler versions of
augmentative communication that I'm going to show in a second um but we we have this you know fairly accessible in our in our district that you know a good number of kids use if you want to learn more about Jordan uh I have a link to her site there and then the end the resources she is a part of what's called
the Nora project which is an organization that helps to try to raise awareness of uh uh you know inclusive classrooms and incl the best inclusive practices or um including you know students with special needs and students with autism so I wanted to share that
story go ahead her her story was really incredible to be honest and it wasn't dissimilar to stories of students that are non-speaking anyway with autism and and things of that nature she express things that we've experienced in in
classes where they're unable to communicate and then they exhibit behaviors and then we exhibit that or we receive that information as well they need a special program somewhere and they need to go they're she's under her desk she's kicking out she's lashing out
she's screaming um she described all of those emotions because she couldn't express herself and then finally after multiple schools and placements and traveling an hour to different locations to to go to school for the day just
trying to access education one day somebody saw her in a different capacity and provided the the tablet and it wasn't like it was a switch was turned it was a process it was a learning curve but it gave her an
opportunity to express herself finally and it and and she had received so much just by being present um so much language that she was able to kind of pick it up and move a little bit but it really took some time for her to really
develop the skill but it it showed that it she was capable she went on to get her high school diploma she went on to get a a you know college degree she went on to get a master's degree um she's now a public speaker all over the place um
and and you know check her out she is incredible it was really really interesting to just watch and see her on stage communicating giving an entire speech you know with the tablet um she even took some live questions so you could see her work with her tablet in
you know live um in real time um because the the speech was you know pre-typed pre-recorded she just kind of went with it um but then she took you know questions and in an interview type of setting and you could see her process
the information and and spit it back out it wasn't like there was some magician behind the curtain putting this together and she was standing there um she put it all together so it really showed you what the opportunity could be when given the opportunity to um you know express yourself um so incredible story um I
just wanted to you know also promote that um you know check out her site and you know really was a nice way for Matt to kick this this whole talk off and I here I you you know I I wanted the spotlight that I got to meet her afterwards i was so excited and she you know same she was doing Q&A so we got to
ask questions i asked her you know if she got to learn any sign language and and I know some sign language so she said she could understand my sign language but she can't process enough to sign back so it was just you know even even then we got to have an interesting conversation you know her using her
tablet as her voice um and and so that's the the opportunity that we give give here in Pquanic too so I I'll segue into um you know this particular app is called Prolquo to go uh it's it's now been around for a pretty long while and
is is kind of the the standard uh this is a somewhat busy screen so this is not what a three-year-old would have uh you know but when we talk about uh depending on how long a student uh needs this to support them um you know this can become
more and more advanced it's very customizable uh and so it can really help someone become you know in much more independent as they go to have this as their voice um I've tried to make sure that if we have students that you know this truly is their voice that when summertime
comes they take this home they you know we're not leaving it here in an inventory if this is a student's voice they're it's going home with them like I I'm not going to take away their voice uh you know and and a lot of those students will will take it at night and they take it home and and this is this is their device to use so uh we our
speech therapists are really probably the ones that know this best uh you know I'm I'm very familiar with Prolo and can do a little programming with it but the the speech therapists know their way around this um you know left and right and I know that our case managers are are familiar with it at all i don't know
uh Kim if you want to chime in if we have case managers that are helping program it but I think it's mainly falling on the the speech therapist hi Kim yeah most of the time we allow the speech therapist to do it because they will also work with them in session to you know kind of get them used to it um
you know we may do pictures or you know give them a list of things or people or words that we want on there but a lot of times the speech therapists are the ones that head that thanks Kim and you can all tell that I loaded the deck tonight so I brought you know Chris Helena and Kim with me in case I I uh wanted to to
get their their view on things you don't want just Matt Shay but here we are i'm you know I'm the tech guy after all uh I threw in here uh you can see in the top there that we're also experimenting with touch chat one of our speech uh speech therapists uh has used touch in the past so that's another augmentative
alternative communication app um and and so we we may start to mix that in uh I find them very similar i've heard some some of my um assisted tech professional friends say they like touch chat more so that might be something we begin to to switch to in the district but here in
Puquanic they've used Prolquo for many years and and with great success you know and when we talk about our our our students um you know with special needs that that need this sometimes it's only for a few years and then finally with between this and hearing the words
pronunciated through either the program or through their their gened classrooms with the help of their speech therapists some students can kind of like graduate out of this that they don't they don't require this tool anymore um you know that that's the goal but you know and then some students I've seen them you
know where at the end of of their time uh at at high school and they graduated it was like well we're you know the district's going to gift you this iPad so you can continue to to have access to this so you know depending on the needs um you know the use of this tool can kind of eb and flow but uh it it's a
great tool i just wanted you know families to know that this is something that we have you know readily available um again I I don't want to beat up on Ohio and Jordan's experience but I would have never waited until you know high school to try to introduce this for for someone that was you know non
non-speaking so all right and a couple other uh tools that that we currently have in district we're using day-to-day um we've been uh using if if I'm sure many parents have seen our old school smartboards i call them old school because they're kind of
obsolete now uh you know I think the district started getting them in probably like 2009 2010 from from my understanding again I've only been here about about a year and a half but uh most of that has been replaced with what we call interactive flat panel displays uh and the model that we chose was new
line uh and so we've done a lot of training with the teachers in the past two years we have new lines everywhere now except the high school and the plan is that this summer we'll upgrade the high school um and and so why do I bring this up as an assisted tech tool you're like well it's just a really big display
but fortunately there's so many tools within this um display that you know we get to to you know use that a lot of their features to help some all of our students again I universal design for learning a lot of these tools help all of our kids but some of the tools very
specifically can help some of our students with some some special needs so um of course it's a 75-in display they're large and beautiful in some areas we even have 86 in it comes with sound at the preschools we added on uh there's a system called light light
field uh light speeded systems excuse me I got it wrong uh and it's an amplification system so if you ever go to our preschools and you see the teacher wearing like a pendant mic it look it looks like kind of a a pullaway necklace uh that's a microphone that will come out of the new line and
there's a lot of research that shows uh especially at the younger level that uh not only all students but you know ADHD students students with hearing impairments all types of students benefit from hearing having the teacher amplified um and and so for now we've
rolled out only preschool we've had conversations about trying to do other grades and and certainly in some some rooms where you know I I want to say maybe we've got a second or third grade classroom where we had a student with a audio impairment um you know we still rolled it out in that room despite not
doing the entire grade um but so that was a benefit of having these new lines is that we we can have the amplification systems right there uh one of the things that we're piloting right now so I'm skipping ahead to to the next section but uh with the new lines uh there's a
uh an option for an AI called Merlin AI it is a furpa and copa compliant tool so it doesn't store any personally identifying information of students um but what it does is it gives the teacher there's a remote that the teacher can carry with them uh and and the teacher can use it to push a button i probably
should have included a picture of the Merlin on this screen somewhere uh but the teacher pushes a button and says um you know search for pictures on photosynthesis and and it will go out to the internet so it's like their own classroom assist uh assistant like almost if you imagine an
educationfriendly Alexa that is Merlin Merlin AI um and so we've been piloting it in a couple classrooms the feedback I've mostly gotten uh is that it really seems to help a lot in some of the classrooms that have students with special needs um because you know if a
teacher is short-handed or you know there's only so many aids or maybe there's only one classroom aid or maybe there's no aid uh it helps a teacher where they can still spend that time right next to the student partnering up with that student and teaching but still be able to to have an an assist a
digital assistant be able to bring things up on the board bring up videos on the board pause things on the board um so it's it's been an interesting tool uh I've gotten some decent feedback i don't think it's a tool that I would put in every single classroom but there's definitely been some classrooms where
the teacher has said "Hey this actually makes a big difference and lets me spend more one-on-one time with this student that really needs it." Uh one of the other really neat tools that they have uh baked into this it's called New Line Broadcast um so there's there's two
directions on casting so one is uh New Line casting where the teacher can take their laptop and they can cast it to the board that's really nice the teacher can really be mobile and move around and and the teachers like that new the broadcast is whatever is on the display the
students can like log in to a broadcast page and whatever is on the the 75-in display is now also showing on their student Chromebook their student screen their iPad uh the way we've really been leveraging that is for a student with a
visual impairment a believe you know a 75 in display may not be big enough for them to read text or see what's happening on the screen so that whatever is happening on the board including the teacher's annotations that can be broadcast directly to the device directly in front of the student and
then the student can choose to magnify and pinch and zoom on their device so it makes whatever the teacher is doing in the classroom much more accessible for that student so again when we talk le least restrictive environment that's letting th those students that you know we we might in the past have thought
about well we need to put them in a in a different area a different environment to help with their needs well now they can access it right there in in the general ed classroom so they get to stay with their peers um so it's the the new lines you know if you were wondering why is Matt talking about a 75 in display and assist of technology they really do
a lot and so we've been spending a lot of time training teachers actually I was just at the middle school before break and we were we were doing a training on one of our half days and talking about you know some of these really niche features for um you know assist of tech so all right and one of the last ones
before we go to the next section um the kind of the gold standard for text to speech is is read and write read and write Google from texthelp and they merged with co-writer which was another big pro product out there in the industry and and so textel bought them merged products so it's like this super
product uh so we have read and write readily available for all students they have like a premium version and so again here I am talking about univers universal design so any any student that says you know what I I prefer to have some things read to me when I'm reading a complex website about uh for science
um and I'm having some trouble with the vocabulary sometimes it helps to have that read to you and so we make you know that is available for students to use uh the premium version gives much more than that and so you can see on the screenshots here um you know there's built-in dictionary they can change the
voice speed up the voice amplify the voice um they if while the students typing um if their spelling is not great and and that's some of part of the writing process they're having trouble with this will use word prediction that's the co-writer portion of this
it'll use word prediction to try to help them with their misspellings or or with their next sentence anyways um so it can make you know writing much more accessible for some of our students so for for a number of our students we have we have the premium version and so this is a a day-to-day tool in their tool
tool belt that helps them with the writing process the reading process and makes you know ELA much more accessible for our students so I didn't want to go too far without without you know mentioning read and write for for text to speech in in some of our classes as well and again Chrome itself and
Chromebooks have made a big jump on this and have included much more text to speech but read and write really has some some pretty sophisticated tools um that in some scenarios really is like the best match for some of our students needs all right this is last one and
then I want to make sure I'm going to the right place all right and then I'll take some questions i know I've been going we're we're uh plowing through here uh iPads are still a big a big piece for assist of technology i know I talked about Chromebooks and bragged about the accessibility in Chromebooks and it is good the iPad accessibility
continues to be amazing uh after I met with Jordan Zimmerman at Texo she's a like as if she doesn't have enough accolades uh Jordan Zimmerman is also an an Apple ambassador uh and and so actually Apple was there at Texo and and
and presented her uh and so they were doing a accessibility playground which was good because I wasn't familiar with uh iOS 18 that just rolled out in the fall uh and so they were featuring and showing off some of their new accessibility features uh so some of the
things on here now current day even even 10 years ago was like unthinkable so using the the front-facing camera eye tracking now um you know in in the past I I worked with a student that was a quadripollegic and so he had some uh it
was called eye gaze and it only worked on a ma I MacBook so we had to buy like a $2,000 MacBook with this eye gaze that would help track his eyes to help him access you know different programs um and now to have that just baked into an
iPad I I mean you know some of this is just amazing switch control uh for for students that don't have good manual dexterity and and need to hit a larger button we call that a switch to help select things on the screen now some of those are Bluetooth and work again just
with an iPad um the iPad is really like the the Swiss Army knife if you will of of assist of technology it it covers a lot of ground uh the voice control they've been doing more and more with predictive text was what uh Jordan Zimmerman was using she wasn't using
Proloquo or another program she was using completely Apple's predictive text to help her with her writing and answers um so that has gotten better and better on iPads there's a lot of assist uh assistive touch so again students with manual dexterity issues um there's a lot
they can do to customize that for their particular needs um uh there's just so much the the real time captioning they call it live captioning uh is is pretty amazing on iPads now and now they've even uh I'm I'm jumping ahead to the
future section but u some of the uh AirPods can now act also as um hearing aids uh and hearing augmentation so uh Apple you know I I sometimes complain about Apple because sometimes they can be expensive and you know sometimes
dealing with Apple and ordering things can be can be hard but their their tools sometimes are a great match for some of our our students in Puquanic uh and I want to say we we probably still have about 400 or so devices in Puquanic that are that are heavily for uh special
education so I I couldn't finish you know some of this conversation without talking about iPads um but let me let me pause for a second we've been going for a while uh if anyone wants to to unmute we've you know we've got a good dozen people on here uh live with us and if anyone's watching the replay sorry you
don't get to do a Q&A but you can always reach out later but does anyone have any questions so far we have one question in the chat um shoot she asked uh is the district going to use a note-taking app um and which one is most popular in other schools
so that could be a broad question um we have different note-taking apps so depending on on you know the need if it's a matter of organization skills um we have some some apps actually believe it or not read read and write Google has a lot of annotation and note-taking
built into it so on a website if you highlight let me see if I can kind of show that you can see in that in that toolbar here I'll try to hover over it i don't know if you can see my cursor um things that you highlight are stored in notes in in read and write Google so
read and write Google itself is a note-taking app uh we have also used uh you know cami or or note takingaking and organization um so on on that side as far as like organization some of our existing tools do have some of that was
there a more specific uh example there and and I'm going to cover some more of this as we keep going but and I know one of the AI um uh professional developments I sat in on
there's other applications coming out that will help organize material like if you're going to use a ven diagram it'll help you populate a ven diagram or or help you choose the right um organizational tool um right those are still developing
and and you know are out there you know to explore um we haven't settled on anything just yet as we get into AI as I'm sure Matt will touch on in a little bit um we can you know you discuss that some more y Hey Matt I was talking about
um when a teacher is giving a lecture and using an app that will actually take notes for the student uh so um that'll skip me ahead a little bit so I'll talk about it for a second now and then I actually have a slide on that closer to the end but um a as we
start talking about uh transcription services and summarizing and apps that can can uh kind of do the do the note takingaking and or organizing for the student um you know those tools certainly exist there's but again since
some of them are emerging there's some some problems with them and I I have a slide on that at the end so I won't steal all of my thunder now but uh but that's those types of tools are becoming much more accessible um I would have said 5 years ago there was not a lot
that did that you know at the time there was Livescribe if you've seen uh Livescribe looked like just a big pen but it had a microphone on the end and it would remember you had to use special paper as you wrote it would also be listening at that time and so wherever
you later at wherever you clicked it would it would pick up that part of your recording um depending on on what you wrote at that time so you know kind of in in the past livescribe was one of the major tools that school districts would use to help with note takingaking and
transcription um I haven't seen Livescribe a lot lately because AI and large language models have have become uh you know kind of a thing the challenge for us and and again I have a slide on it at the end the challenge for us is uh what can we legally use in a
school and what would we need parent permission to use in a school some of these tools are not supposed to be used by students under 18 years old um you know that's a challenge and also um you know some of the transcription means that we're recording teachers and so we get into an area where you know some of
it is a union thing where we need to get a teacher's permission to say hey I'd like to record you um so it's there's some challenges you know so so some of that technology is definitely out there uh I think in the next few years it'll be more ironed out that it'll it we'll start to see it really readily
accessible uh in K12 education i think in in colleges it's you know at this point much more accessible but yeah and even in that um professional development that I was in they used a live scribe um like a one of the screens was dedicated in
the auditorium that we were in one of the screens in the front of the room was dedicated to um recording the speaker and displaying their words and so it gave a transcription of everything that was said which for me sitting in there
taking you know copious notes myself um it was really helpful to say oh what did he say and I could look up and it had the last like you know 40 or 50 words displayed and it was a constant scroll um but I will say there was a point in time where I looked looked up at the
screen and it was explicit there was a word that it heard in a specific way i was like "Oh god look at that." And so I can see they're still working on that technology it was really really helpful i think that in
our classroom settings um for a teacher to to have that displayed if they're in a a heavy lecture I know a lot of our classrooms are getting away from heavy lectures um and but in that framework I feel like it is really helpful um
because I could look back and see what they just said i'm like "Oh what did he say about that?" Oh there it is right there and then I could keep up with the lecture um a little more freely because I had that resource so I can see definitely an application for it but like you know Mr sheay said there is
some you know legal components to it about recording and who's recording and I know the way the law reads just you know in the state but within our school settings and if there's a kid speaking out or you know what ages are we working with um those are all policies that uh we need to you know develop and and um
you know implement but um progress and I I know what you're saying about you know not just a noteaker but you know something to you know write down all the things that are said so you don't miss something and I used to use a recorder in college you know for some of my lectures um again that's in a very
lecture-based setting uh so yeah definitely an application we're not quite there yet um the technology is you know rapidly evolving um but something we're paying attention to that's a good segue into our next section though uh and and again you you'll notice that again I have the live captioning going
on here in Zoom and again iPads if you're on iOS 18 has live captioning so it's it's becoming pretty common place pretty quickly um but I it certainly is not not perfected and and not quite K12 ready
but but let me let me jump in and try to feature a couple more interesting things uh and that might answer you know show some more things that are that are kind of out there there's one more question Matt about read and write with coowwriter um she said the read and
write coowwriter on my daughter's Chromebook so that I can see oh is the read and write coowwriter um on my daughter's Chromebook so that she can see it so we don't force install it the it's it's an allowed install so if the kids want it they can just go down they can go look for it and download it
themselves um the kids can't download just anything or else I'd have Minecraft everywhere uh so uh but they can they can install it for when we have a student with special needs and the case manager has written that in and said oh no the student definitely needs text to speech and a text to speech program you
know we'll go and and force install it on on that device but uh right now read and write is a is basically an optional software that the kids can download themselves so so there we have it uh all right so one of the tools um when
I came aboard last year uh we had some I had a couple different case managers reach out saying "Hey we have students that are having trouble accessing uh you know printed documents and what is out there." And and as I started asking around it had been a little while since I had looked around um and
and there's been different levels of uh what we call OCR optical character recognition and so before you know you may have to use a tablet and then finally you could start to use your cell phone well now about two years ago uh the Scan Marker Pro scan Marker has been
around a little while but they just released this version of it called the Scan Marker Pro came out so we have uh I want to say maybe maybe five or six students that are currently using this so this is fairly new for us uh and you can see there on on the device so it's got a little touchcreen on it and you
tell the device what you want it to do and and so in most cases it's going to it's going to read for us uh and then the kids can it it takes some practice but they can go line by line they can scan just a word they can scan a whole sentence they can scan a whole paragraph
and then a as they as they scan that across the page it the device will then read it off to them uh now if that so it's not an interruption in the middle of a classroom that can pair with a a pair of earbuds or it even comes with its own uh like plug-in earbuds so for
some of our students that are using the middle classroom and they're having access you know trouble accessing a a paper document that the teacher handed out uh they can pull out their scan marker they put on their headphones and they can scan and and have that help read it to them to make you know that
physical document more accessible so not just having you know the digital doc documents accessible for our students but even uh physical ones um what's interesting about this one is it's not just you know students with special needs we have this in the hands of some of our multil- language learners um
because English is not their first language and so they're really struggling with it and you'll notice the second button there says translate so they can click that button pick their language um I think the scan marker is a little limited i think it's maybe like 12 or 15 languages but then as they scan
it will it will change it to their language so you know if you know like our NJSLA test you know the the thing we're trying to assess is hey how much do they know about the English language but when it's just you know a worksheet or or resource the teachers hand out in
the classroom you know that's not necessarily assessment we just want them to have that as a resource so to make it more accessible either with text to speech or with the translate feature uh it's been a really interesting tool uh you'll you'll see that one of the
setting things it also has on there is a record feature but I don't know if it does any like form of transcription but I think they tried to kind of in that feature tried to kind of emulate the the live scribe um but the the real power of this one is that you you line up that
that line of text scan it and it and it reads it off to you so it makes you know a lot of paper documents very accessible for our students so that's been a very interesting one that again we've got at at different levels um but we've got five or six of them floating around uh
another one and and I'm kind of featuring more multil- language learners again uh you know but just to talk general assistive tech that has really changed we've bought a couple of these pocket talks uh so this is a live translation device they can do 90 plus
uh languages um and and again we're we're getting some students that you know got here in June they come to us in September you know how much English could they have possibly learned in two or three months and so it's a it's a real barrier because they may be in like a general ed classroom and the teacher
is not translating to Ukrainian or Venezuelan you know and Portuguese um so these have really helped you know at least for conversations and and the students can leave it running um to to understand what the teacher is saying
these don't record um so that's you know as we one of the conversations has been like transcription and what does that look like um these aren't meant for that it's really meant for communication we have a few of these in our main offices and at the board office so if if a parent that doesn't speak English comes
in but needs assistance we can use these to be able to provide that assistance um you know and the secretaries have gotten some training on how to use these right in the main office and at the at the board office uh so it's kind of you know even one of my last slides we have another thing about translation it's
kind of a magical time for translation so um we're starting to see some just very interesting devices and this is one that I again I think maybe we've got five or six of these out in the district uh and another one okay so this is the special announcement one because
I I haven't revealed this to our teachers yet uh so the Learning Ally is is a fantastic product that I had in my last district i've been kind of fighting to try to to get it here um and and I'll talk about what it is first and then I'll and then I'll reveal the surprise or I'll let Chris reveal the surprise uh
so Learning Ally is a a sort of audiobook service um we in the past have used bookshare.org and and are still using it um but bookshare.org first uh its audiobooks are like robotic translations these ones are narrated by
kids it's narrated by actors it's nar narrated by adults so it's it's human voices which makes the audiobooks much friendlier uh and the the library is pretty vast and if a teacher requests a specific book if you give them time they'll go get the book they'll find an
actor they'll get it read and they'll get it added added in here the the big difference between Bookshare and Learning Ally is Bookshare um because it's a free service you know and when you start talking about um uh book publishers they're they're not super fond of handing things out for free so
Bookshare you must have a a documented IEP with a print disability um so whether it's either visual impairment uh you know dyslexia whatever whatever that is for learning ally it's supposed to be you know a print disability 504 or struggling reader um and and so once you
throw that in I mean you know we have struggling readers all over the place so uh it's up to the it doesn't necessarily have to be documented but if the teacher uh surmises that you know what this student I'm teaching fourth grade English we're we're reading this chapter book and this student I have is at a lower Lexile level they're reading at a
third grade level I think it would be more accessible for them to have the option of listening to audiobook they can assign this so uh so for any teachers that watch this tomorrow uh the state of New Jersey uh partnered with Learning Ally recently and they wanted to add um Chris what was the magic
number 180 school districts or something um and and so the the state of New Jersey offered a grant so for at least a year and we're hoping it will be ongoing uh we're getting Learning Ally and I'm rolling it out next month so so for parents out there you're getting the inside scoop that the district is adding
on Learning Ally um in in my last district I remember we had a student uh that was in in fifth grade he was reading at a third grade level he he really had great difficulty uh reading print i I can't remember precisely what the disability was but they introduced
Learning Ally to him and and so the power of Learning Ally is the teacher can assign books and so the teacher was assigning what they were doing in the classroom and he found it so accessible one of the other features is the kid can go through and just browse books and add them to his bookshelf and and and go and
and read more so by the end of that school year he found reading so accessible and so enjoyable that he had read 190 books on his own so if that's not a if that's not a victory you know I don't know what is if you told any fifth grade teacher that their kid might one
of their students would read 190 books I think they'd all do a celebration and and hop you know champagne so uh so this is one that I'm really excited that you know I worked with Chris I worked with Dr poris uh and Marie Vanickle um you know our director of curriculum to try to get this and the board approved our
our acceptance of the donation from the NJDE last board meeting uh oh and and I forgot Tina is one of our board members so thank you board member um so we're going to get this rolled out uh in the next week or two and then we'll start training the teachers so hopefully they can use it a little bit here in May and
June and so that way September we'll hit the ground running and and have this as a as a tool in our tool belt so that's a big one all right I'm going to try to knock out the last three SL slides quickly to get to the Q&A because we're we're getting close to time so these are some
of the the future technologies so I couldn't go very far without talking about artificial intelligence and it's all I've been talking about all year the you know the other administrators are probably sick and tired of hearing me talk about it and the teachers and some of the students um but it's it's
really a big inflection point in K12 education and if not you know the world right now um and and as the the one parent pointed out like this this is something that really could have a big a profound effect on assist of technology and just how kids operate in general in
in the classroom so uh this particular one I'm I'm kind of showcasing on the screen here uh is Notebook LM from Google and Notebook LM is a very neat tool because it's it was really geared for research uh really kind of specifically higher ed and and
universities and colleges um but so you you put in your notes your own PDFs it can be handwritten notes there's different ways that you can add your notes uh and then you can do things with those notes and so you can see on the right side I can ask it to look through
my notes and make me a study guide make me flashcards make me frequently asked questions out of my notes uh the interesting one you can see it's got an audio overview you can have it generate a podcast with chat bots talking about your topic um so it's it's a really
interesting tool that can help students digest their notes and process their notes and and listen for this is not just assist of tech this is gened is any any person can benefit from more easily summarizing and digesting and processing
their notes um the holdup on this one is that Google has flat out said we have not made this tool fura and copa compliant yet uh I'm going to skip ahead to my next slide uh I'll go back come back to that one um so that means uh students under 18 are not supposed to
use notebook LM uh and and really a lot of these AI tools are not not compliant with Furpa and COPA so uh that's a Family Education Rights Privacy Act and Children's Online Privacy Protection Act look at that i just spit those right out
um so that's a lot of the laws that we abide by that we will protect students uh personally identifying information um and so that's kind of slowed down the adoption of AI which which is probably good because we you know we're trying to pace ourselves and roll out AI in a in a
thoughtful manner that doesn't derail teachers and what they're trying to teach and doesn't derail students learning so um you know we're we're kind of on the the slower side of AI in K12 education but we're trying to you know follow that and approach that uh I'm I'm
the head of a AI committee we've met six or seven times this year and we're trying to help develop an AI plan and guide for teachers we're trying to develop um uh an academic uh integrity policy for students so they better understand when am I allowed to use AI
and when am I not and what are the appropriate ways to use AI so we're we are definitely uh addressing this in the district uh you know I wish we could do it faster but you know it there's a lot to to kind of process and and our stakeholders are administrators students
teachers parents um we have a lot of voices on on this committee so it's it's you know it's it's a lot to kind of take on but uh but so one one interesting use that I definitely see coming in the future is having AI help students with not necessarily transcription but you
know summarizing notes and and helping students stay organized um you know I've I've had a lot of students say that they liked it for flashcards so they they took their own notes fed it in these are some high school students that said they just did it on their own accord uh you know fed in their notes asked it to make
it flash cards and use it to help them study for tests i you know that's a that's a good use of AI so um along with AI what I kind of foresee and we're starting to see emerge is using AI as a tutor you know the the students might only get access to their math teacher 45
minutes a day and then they go home and they ask you to help them with algebra 2 and you're like I don't know algebra 2 what how do I even do algebra 2 so now uh there's some some tutors out there the big ones being uh Khanmies Con Migo uh Magic Schools Raina that are FURPA
and Copa compliant uh and don't just give the answer to the student it tries to walk them through like the process of of understanding their homework and understanding their answer um so I I probably see that really emerging more in the future is having AI as like a
personalized tutor u for students to help them with their with their learning and and I think that's a good use of it too yeah um unless teachers want to start taking calls at 6:00 7 or 8 at night when kids are doing homework or 11 at night you know if you've got a high
schooler I don't know um but the the tutors are an interesting thing uh you know but we definitely have some things we have to work through so I I it mentioned already the data privacy the the ethics and literacy is another thing that we really have to approach with the teachers and students so they understand
that there's there's some limitations to AI um and and to be wary of those and and aware and and aware of them so um I have one or two other things and I'll wrap up if anyone can stay for Q&A that's great if not I'm I'm sorry that
I'm going a little over um this one Chris and I saw at Texo and I I was just like "Oh my gosh I needed this when I was a kid." Uh the University of Washington developed what they're calling selective hearing headphones and so you put on the headphones and turn them on it can be a room you know the
example they showed in in this video and I won't I won't torture you with the whole video uh is that there's like they're in a cafe there's eight or nine people around them and conversations happening all over so anyone that has some processing issues or a auditory issues you can put on the headphones you
look at the person you want to hear from you hold down a button for I forget if it's like 10 seconds 15 seconds and uh the microphones look at the the you know they're directional so the microphones focus in on the person talking and it uses a AI to figure out the frequency
and after so many seconds you've trained the headphones that that's the person you're listening to and it cancels everything else so you hear you know the idea is you hear the teacher and everything every other distraction just gets canceled out and you don't hear anything else uh and and when I first
saw this I was like we have 2200 students we should buy 2200 of these right away you know just so kids could focus on the teacher but uh you know this is a really interesting technology it is not for sale yet but uh more and more audio technology is becoming available like this i bet in the next 5
years that this is going to be a commonplace item uh and we'll we'll you know it can be a conversation for for case managers and parents to to discuss and the last one I was going to share just for crazy futuristic things um you know we've been talking augmented
reality virtual reality for a lot of years i have a MetaQuest 3 at home um yeah I don't know if anyone has the Apple VR if you spent that much money but Meta uh Facebook u Meta the parent company Meta has been working with Rayban to make you know smart glasses if
you remember Google's first attempt they're very ugly these ones look like normal glasses um but they have a camera on them they can record it it has the speakers built into the to the frame um and and so one of the again the
real-time translation we're we're in a magical time that you could just be like great I'm going to put these on i'm going to go travel to Fr France i don't speak speak a lick of French but I'm going to be able to walk around and and kind of understand some people around me when I ask questions and and be able to
order off a menu you know um you know we these are kind of magical times that in this this particular example here uh it's using the camera to translate what it sees in the in the picture um so you can read road signs and read things in
restaurants um you know it's and that's available right now i'm not trying to I do not own Meta stock you know please don't don't think that I'm a Meta employee but this is kind of an impressive technology that's kind of far ahead of their competitors and you're going to see more and more of this in the next few years when we talk about
wearable technologies i'm wearing my my smartwatch right now but um smart smart glasses are are definitely definitely going to be a thing uh the one thing I I talked to to Chris and Helena about I wanted to to just def definitely uh emphasize um as I as I showcased all of
these amazing tools and uh many of these tools our case manager is aware of i talk to Kim Busher all the time and I know she's on top of a lot of this um if you ever have questions please please please start with your case manager first they know you know the the intimate details of your student's IEP
uh they know some of the tech that your student may have already touched um so if you ever have questions you know please start with your with your case manager uh I I occasionally sit in on you know IEP meetings or I do some one-on-one trainings with students and with teachers but uh and and I'm I'm
glad to take any email but often if you email me my first question is going to be like did you talk to your case manager first so please make sure you always loop in and talk to your your case managers uh Chris do you or Helena if you're on here still do you want to chime in to to reinforce that yeah I
mean that's exactly right i mean start with your case manager or even your guidance counselor if there's anyone on here that has a student that does not have an IEP yet if there's any questions out there regarding um you know some tech or some assistive um devices or if there's just a question
about it if this something is available might help my student um and and if they don't know they can help put the pieces together within the district you know put the resources together connect you to Matt Shay and his team or you know connect you to whoever is you know the
speech language pathologist um the case managers can put the pieces together to to collaborate and you know make the most appropriate approach to satisfy those needs or or explore options i know uh Kim that joined us on the call that I roped in today we worked we're
like the dynamic duo and work together all the time i frequently see Amy Shay and Shannon Patty down at the middle school um you know some of the elementary case managers I've done some work with so uh yeah we're we're they call it child study team for a reason we are a team and and uh a lot
of us have specialtities but the the case managers are definitely the go-to people so uh and that is about all I have uh again I'm going to post this whole presentation tomorrow i'll post a recording as well but there's some just outstanding links on here i have links
to the Chromebook and iPad accessibility but uh ASA uh the assist of technology industry association is great the Norah Project that's Jordan Zimmerman's uh organization that she's helping with um that has blueprints on how to be inclusive and include students with
special needs in classrooms um the center for inclusive technology and education uh has amazing resources and constantly does great webinars i catch a lot of those uh and then we have uh the NJ coalition for advancement of assistive and rehabilitation technology
njart that is easier to say than than that mouthful uh that is some local people that are assisted tech professionals that offer free tools a lot of what they've been doing has been providing training videos for free for aids uh so that that has just been really good these are just some awesome
resources so if you want kind of just more of what we've been talking about um I I just threw a couple of those great resources in here tonight so you can learn more about it so uh I'm sorry that I went five minutes over if anyone has questions I'm glad to stay um for anyone
that needs a run thank you for joining us tonight cpac let me let me thank you all again uh for Matt if I could just like I I just wanted to jump in really quick um I wanted to formally I'm texting with my whole CPAC group here we wanted to thank you uh formally uh for taking the time planning this out with
uh Mr foglio Miss Miss Bronco um it's amazing to see some of the things that are happening in district sort of like behind the scenes um I appreciate case manager being on here late at night like that we appreciate you um and and just seeing what's going on out there i mean just like off the top of my head I'm
thinking these are things that either whether students choose to go into the workplace into collegiate atmosphere college whatever um they're going to need these kind of skills and you guys are enforcing them at very early ages and you're giving them a wide variety to choose from so um we certainly um
appreciate the work you and your team are doing and it's obvious that it's a team effort um you guys have really um put that out there uh that you know everything is allworked and and and everything's collaborative with your team so uh we wanted to just say thank you for enlightening us showing us you
know sort of peak behind the curtain and um you know thank you again and and you know people are messaging me this is great i had no idea so uh just wanted to put that out there no thank uh you know thank you Tina for you know mentioning it to me a couple months ago um I know
we we kind of talked about it earlier in the year and we've been help again cpac's been putting out some really great parent universities i remember in my first year last year they put out four or five there was one or two in the fall there was one just in like February um so CPAC's been a great organization
so if there's any parents that are seeing this for the first time didn't know what CPAC was the uh special education advisory committee um you know by all means please join them follow them more um there there's just some really great stuff so thank you all for having me tonight and uh I'll be glad to
do it again anytime you ask so questions uh and if anyone needs to go I take no offense so go you by by all means you can sign on out but if anyone's got questions you you're welcome to stay on chat me i put my email at the end of that presentation so cheers i see a lot lot of people
signing off in the chat thank you everybody