TSBVI Coffee Hour
An Update on the Progression of Tactile Learning Developmental Checklist

>> Good afternoon and welcome everyone. We'll get started in a couple of minutes. While you're coming in, please go ahead and in your chat box make sure that the little dropdown menu says all panelists and attendees. So that as you type a comment or a question, everyone can see that. Again, in that chat box, make sure the little dropdown menu says all panelists and attendees. We'll get started in just a couple of minutes. In the meantime, if you want to let us know in the chat where you're joining us from, that is always fun for us to see. . I was just in Louisiana the other day. I was driving through. Welcome. Ontario. Got some New England. Minnesota. Nova Scotia. We're excited to have you with us, Amanda, in Albany, New York. 

>> Take us. 

>> Hey, Virginia beach. My old stomping grounds. Welcome, welcome. Again, we'll get started here in just another minute. 

>> Wow, somebody from grand prairie. I used to live in van, whoever that is. Close enough. 

>> Grand prairie, is that close to van? 

>> No, it's not. Never mind. I don't know where I used to live. Never mind. 

>> Grand saline. 

>> It was grand saline. >

>> All right. Let's go ahead and get started. I'm not sure. Everybody else sounds okay here, so it might be on your end. All right. Let's go ahead and I'm going to start with some announcements and then we'll turn the time over to our presenters. First of all, welcome to coffee hour. We are glad to have you with us, especially for these last few weeks of the school year for coffee hour. . Please note, again, if you have a question or a comment during the presentation, please go ahead and post that in the chat box. You're going to want to make sure that the little dropdown menu in your chat box says all panelists and attendees so that everyone can see your comment or your question. Your microphones and cameras are automatically muted. You don't need to worry about that. You're not going to suddenly pop on the screen. No worries there. The handout has been shared in the chat and you can see that immediately. It will also be available for later viewing along with the recording of this coffee hour session. You can also find our previous coffee hour sessions if you go to TSBVI.edu/coffee hour. Once you're there, scroll past the list of current sessions and you'll see a place to access our coffee hour archive. Just so you know, we're in the process of updating that. So things will be a little easier to find. Thank you for your patience as we're organizing that. We have a lot of information because we've been doing this for a while. To obtain your CEUs or your professional development credits, you'll respond to the evaluation that will be e-mailed to you from our registration website. I will give you a code at the end of the session. There is no opening code. Just a closing code. We'll stop the presentation at 12:55 or five to the hour to give you that code and some announcements. Without further adieu, I'm excited to send it over to our presenters today with Debra Sewell, Ann Adkins, Sara Kitchen and Scott Baltisberger all from TSBVI. Turn it over to you. 

>> Hello everyone. My name is Debra Sewell, I'm the curriculum director at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. My co-presenters today are from our outreach program and they are Ann Adkins, Scott Baltisberger and Sara Kitchen. Back in October of 2020, Scott and Sara did a coffee hour on this topic and we are now going to give you a little bit of an update on it. Our update is to share the newly developed checklist of crucial skills that are needed by tactile learners. This checklist can be used to create an individual tactile profile of a student and it identifies the strengths and the needs related to tactile learning and the development of pre-braille skills for students who are chronologically and/or developmentally functioning between the ages of birth to five years old who have struggled or who have struggled with the acquisition of tactile skills We've included resources for further evaluation. If you have questions about whether or not they can do what we're asking them to do and also activities for instruction to instruct the deficit area. Scott and Ann are going to share more on that later. First of all, we'd like to share a few of the reasons we wanted to create this tactile profile. As students with student -- we have over the years discovered that many students struggle with the acquisition of the prerequisite skills for tacti Children will will meaningful experiences that facilitate the development of motor, skills -- as well as language acquisition and concept development. But when children with visual impairments are not provided these opportunities and many, many, many hands-on experiences, teachers of students with visual impairment have to be prepared to address the gaps. So instructors have to model and teach the language that links the perceptions and concepts by using the descriptive words and concept acqu We've also discovered that already no shortcuts. Real hands-on, do it myself experiences are vital to what we're doing. Students -- if students aren't provided with these meaningful concepts and these meaningful experiences to build those motor skills and tactile discrimination skills and those language skills, then printer braille isn't going to hold a lot of meaning for them. We've also discovered that many of the existing evaluation tools do not address these tactile skills in small enough increments and Scott and Sara -- Scott and Ann will tell you more about that. Last but not least in our collective years of teaching students with visual impairments, we have found that there is a need to identify and target specific skills that are tactile skills for student who is are struggling with the acquisition. When I was teaching in my early childhood classroom years ago and my elementary classroom here at TSBVI, I often assumed that students had the concepts needed to be a tactile learner. . They often did not have those skills. It was frustrating for both me and the kids. Next slide. Our guiding principles. The quote on this slide says literacy emerges throughout a lifetime in a seamless process. By Caitlin Mcmun Dooley. As we change and as we grow, we see this every day in our lives, we learn new literacy skills that help us to function in our lives. We've probably learned a few over the last year of being on Zoom meetings in the COVID era. . Think about that in your own lives and as you go through live you learn new literacy skills that help you survive that phase of your life. Every tactile learner, the slide says every tactile learner is potentially literate. Students function along conceptual, motor, tactile and emotion skills. These are not disconnected. They are sequential, contingent and interdependent. . So taking that into consideration, we believe all learners can be literate at their functioning level and that literacy takes many forms, gestures, objects, tactile symbols, print, braille and the tactile learners develop these literacy skills we're talking about along a fluid continuum. We believe they're not disconnected. That they are completely and totally dependent. These skills build upon each other to build that foundation for our students. So in order to move the kids that we have along this continuum, we must systematically promote and provide increased opportunities for movement, for interaction with objects and with other people and for stimulation to children who are going to be tactile learners. . Given this, a student's overall cognitive, emotional and physical development may have a significant impact in the long run on how the students use their hands. We also believe that when children are provided with a tactile stimuli paired with human interaction, they begin to develop an awareness of and attention to touch. Our tactile learners need families and professionals to model tactile exploration. Using touch to invite children to share the experiences. This is done in hand underhand exploration. Children feel like they have a little bit of control over their hands and the option to engage or withdraw from touch. So as tactile skills develop, children learn to use and refine them for functional purposes, locating, exploring, recognizing, comparing, communicating and organizing. These functional skills are essential for living as a tactile learner and it's important to our support your toouds in the development of all of those skills. It's important that we have resources for further evaluation as well as instructional ideas to address the needs that we're addressing on our tactile learning profile. . Next slide. Every tactile learner is potentially literate. Often because some of the students have not had the chance to demonstrate their skills in a typical way, they're categorized as nonreaders and we separate our students a lot of times into reader versus non-reader category. The slide says separation of learners as either readers versus none readers or nontraditional tactile learnerser. A -- they lack the skills to be a flute reader, they struggle with comprehension, word attack skills and identification of vocabulary. They often chibt inappropriate behaviors to hide their inability because if they can't read, they don't want you to know they can't read. So they are acting out or misbehaving or refusing to read. Nontraditional tactile learners could include students with multiple impairments who aren't and may not ever be readers as we think of in the traditional sense. But, like I said in the previous slide, all learners can be literate at their specific functional level. That's our belief. That we have to remember that literacy takes many forms. Gestures, objects, tactile symbols, braille, and Sara is going to discuss this further on the next -- further on the next slide. 

>> Thanks, Debra. Sara Kitchen. I'm going to talk a little bit more about why we were motivated to create the checklist. A little bit more about our perceptions of a learner as a non-reader. If we use this kind of language, it can color our perception of a person and what I really want to know is what, does the label of a non-reader do for the child? Does it do anything for the child? I think that one of the things it can do to the educators, it can limit how we see the student's learning potential and it can even alter th Another problem I have with the term non-reader is that it -- it focuses on what the student can't do, like what Debra was talking about. I think it's a lot more worthwhile to talk about and folk is on what the child can do. Like Debra said, literacy is a multilevel set of skills and it exists along a continuum from birth. . Some examples are pre-lingual gestures and -- shared between a child and parent considered literacy? When a baby is playing with their spoon and dropping it on the floor over and over again, is that considered literacy? Our communicative -- motor skill development, are those things components of literacy? We think so. Let's go to the next slide. This is about tactile skills. So we all know that lack of access to information is a giant influence on development. We have to examine the foundational skills and one of the foundational skills to look at is motor impairment. Motor impairment can really have a profound impact on access to information. Just like the distance and impairment of the distance senses can. We know that incidental information that sighted people take for granted is often never perceived by our students. Debra talked about that a lot. The lack of skill acquisition really indicates that the child has not had the experiences that they need in order to understand what is being asked of them. And the problem with the foundational skills causes a lot of plateaus and causes roadblocks in learning. Another thing that can contribute to a lack of access to information is medical intervention or illness, which is -- medical intervention can be very necessary, but it also can get in the way and it can -- cause sensory deprivation, emotional trauma and all of those things affect cognitive and emotional and tactile skill development. . Another thing that we sometimes do when we have higher expectations on the high expectations side, we may jump to what a student is not ready to do yet. And the student experiences failure over and over. That can cause the kind of emotional trauma that creates a stuck feeling, one of those roadblocks that we're talking about. . So the first step that we need to do when we come across a situation like this is, where a student seems to have roadblocks and seems to have, you know, have gotten to a plateau or we just don't know where to start is determine which foundational skills are missing or weak. . That's what the tactile profile is. If you click the link in the chat that's a handout has that tactile profile in it, if you can download that, we're going to be looking at it a little bit later. Then you'll be able to see an example of it in its draft form. . On the next slide, the issues with evaluation tools was another reason why we wanted to create this checklist. Research on the tactile system is much less robust than it is on other senses, the distance senses. It's really no surprise we don't understand the tactile system -- society as a whole and everybody doesn't really understand the tactile system nearly as well. And there are a lot of great evaluation tools out there. We just kind of need to know when and for what to use them. Some of those are even been created especially for children with visual impairments. One of the things we noticed is most don't have a stand alone section on tactile skill development. If they do, the increments of skill development can be really large and it's hard to figure out where exactly the breakdown has happened. . When we have the large increments, it might show that a skill is missing but it doesn't pinpoint the smaller steps required to gain that skill. We really need that information, that's the part missing. That's the part we need to teach. Those assessments with the larger increments are insufficient in providing interventions for students also who learn more slowly, who show progress through smaller steps and we know there are many of those students with multiple disabilities who learn this way. The tactile profile provides us a place to record the strengths of the students. That's what they can do types of things. It provides pointers towards evaluations and strategies as well as resources to support development of the milestones that they haven't yet mastered and the evaluations and strategies guide towards teaching the correct intermediate skills that create or clear those roadblocks to learning those milestones. . Slide number 7 is about the purpose of the tactile profile. The tactile profile is really meant to be a global approach for evaluation and intervention focused on tactile skills. For a tactile learner, the focus on the aspects of learning that we are not accustomed to considering can be really, really important. So this helps us focus on those tactile parts. The tactile profile assists in us in stepping outside the well-known modalities of vision and hearing. Instead, we very closely learn about how somebody learns through touch. It also provides the foundational skills for teachers to understand the effects that gaps in learning have on skill acquisition and then helps them do the detective work of finding where the gaps are. When we have that foundational skill as teachers, we'll be able to create programming to then students --. Now Scott is going to talk about the development and design of the tactile learning profile. 

>> Thank you, Sara. Hi everybody. So yeah I'm here to talk about the development and just sort of a general structure of what it looks like. Then Ann is going to talk more about how we actually use it. So what we did, the first thing we did was go back and look over through -- comb through a lot of evaluations and assessments that are existing. We didn't see a need to reinvent the wheel but rather to look at what was available and pull out those parts that address, specifically addressed early tactile development. So we looked at things like insight. We looked at Texas two steps. We looked at the Oregon project. We looked at Nielsen's functional scheme. . Anything that had information about early tactile development in children. So it was quite a big undertaking, I want to say. We spent a lot of time talking about skills and seeing where they're at and figuring out which ones we wanted to use. Because what we wanted to do was take all those, once we had sort of a massive database of all these different skills, we looked at putting them in a sequence of -- that was more or less developmental in nature. So we wanted to come up with milestones. We wanted to find certain tactile milestones that we could identify a specific sort of time in a child's development. I think we mentioned earlier that kids are always -- don't always follow the same sequence, they don't always develop in an even way. But we thought if we could get a fairly common ee quens, that that would help for us to look at where the child was, if there were gaps, if there were things that we needed to go in and fill out. So once we had done that, once we had this sequence of tactile skills, we created questions around them. So the question is what you use to assess the child. . The question will ask you something specific to that milestone, to that tactile skill's milestone. This was also another thing, we really had to go in and design questions that were clear, relatively concise, but also gave enough information so you knew what we were asking. And so in some cases, it was quite challenging. So when do you -- we're asking for your feedback on this tool. We really want to know, it's really helpful for us to know, do you understand what we're asking you? Is this question helpful? But we'll get to that later on. We'll talk about you guys giving us feedback later on. Finally, after we had gotten that together, after we had developed the sequence and had paired that with assessment tools, we looked at instructional materials that address each of those skills. . So whatever skill you're looking at, whatever skill you've just assessed, if there's a child that needs more work on that, you decide that's where you need to work with the child at, there's instructional materials that you can look at to address that particular skill. That was basically what we did to develop it. Let's look at what we have. This is how it's organized. So the first thing you're going to see when you open it up is this general information section. We'll look at that. The general information is just that. It's really a lot of what Sara and Debra were talking about. It's more about kind of where -- how the document came to be. And what our philosophy was in applying it and thinking about how tactile skills develop it and what are the impo That's what you'll see first of all is that general information part. The next part is the tactile profile organization chart. You can see -- questions chart. You can see how it's set up and Ann will talk more about how you use it when I'm finished. . Okay. These are the instructions, which Ann is going to go over. Let's look at this. If you'll notice, there are four columns. So on the far left side are the numbers of the questions. That's so you'll be able to reference the questions with the reference materials and the instructional materials and the assessment materials later on. So if you'll notice, there's the number. Then there is the question. Question number one says, are there any medical conditions that might impact the child's senses. For example, diabetes, seizure disorders, cerebral palsy, neuropathy. . Then in the third column over, there is the answer column. So you're to answer yes, no or I don't know. And next to that in the far right, there's the notes column. The notes is where you could put any additional information you might -- that might be helpful if you need to go do further assessment or if you just need to maybe ask yourself more questions or look for more information. The notes section can help you with that. . These are the questions. Some of the questions themselves are pretty long. Some of them have a lot of sort of qualifying information. If you look here on number 4, it says is there any indication of sensory integration issues? For example, need for excessive movement, spinning, rocking, flapping, need or pressure. Such as wedging fingers under heavy objects, needs a lot of roughhousing/hugging. Doesn't move enough. Passive, sleepy, overreactive to touch. So forth and so on. We tried to give you a lot of information to help you. If you read the question and said gee, sensory integration, I'm not sure. This would be some ideas to help you move further through that question. . So that's the tactile profile where you'll be scoring the child. The next thing would be the evaluation resources chart. Here you've got three columns. There's the number one. The number of the question. It's the exact same question we asked in the previous -- in the profile itself. That's so you can reference it a little easier. Then here, this is where you can get the information. For example, it says you can get that information about medical conditions from con sumting the parents or reviewing medical records or you could do the individual sensory learning profile interview from Anthony. . There's actually -- let me go down further to question 3. Sometimes there's actually or most of these it is actually the assessment tool that we looked at when we were arranging these questions. So if you look on question 3 about has the child had any -- is there anything that indicates the child may have had speern highly averse sif touch. There's insight developmental checklist. There's the -- by chin and downing. The individual sensory learning profile, the functional scheme by Nielsen. There's ready bodies, learning minds, cultivating the complete child which is a physical therapist ament. We looked at a lot of different things. If you weren't sure about the question, you can go and pull out the functional scheme and use that. . Finally, there's the instructional resources chart. The same setup as the assessment chart. So you've got the number on the far left. You've got the question restated again in the middle column and in the far column, you've got the instructional resources. This is where you look to find things that specifically address the skill that is referenced in the question. . We're also working on an additional resources packet, which we don't have up to date. I think Ann will also talk about that a little bit more in her section. Ann, would you like to do that now? 

>> Okay. Thank you, Scott. I want to share some information with you on how to use and administer -- thank you, Lowell. Administer this instrument. So that you can create a tactile profile for your student. Want to emphasize the bullets on this slide, how important it is to gather information from multiple evaluators. As teachers of the visually impaired, I know that all of you probably realize how you see different information from different people. Children often exhibit skills differently at home and at school. How many times have you heard a teacher say they can do this and the parents say no, they doont Vice versa. They can do it at home but not at school. It's very important to have multiple people complete the questions chart. For this reason, it's also important to observe and evaluate the student in a variety of environments. Both indoors and outdoors. In familiar places as well as those that are unknown. At different times of the day, et cetera. We know that students perform differently as do we, at different times of the day and in different places. . That's another reason why it's so important to have multiple evaluators. One of our most important reminders is this last bullet, to complete the entire checklist. I should probably put that in bold. There's some reasons for that. Sara kind of mentioned, talked about that students with visual impairments often exhibit splinter skills, gaps in their learning. We know students who, for example, can demonstrate mastery of a certain skill but they can't do something that is seemingly related or maybe even similar skill or even, you know, something that should have happened even before they got to that skill. . These gaps in their learning are not uncommon for students with visual impairments. So it's extremely important that you complete the entire checklist. Just because the student can't do one skill on the list doesn't mean they may not be able to do a skill someplace else. . So please complete the entire checklist before determining a plan for further evaluation or for instruction. One more recommendation, suggestion, reminder that is not on this slide is that it's important to remember to have a student demonstrate their understanding or mastery of a skill. Don't rely on verbal responses or anecdotal information from family members or teachers or team members. . It's important for you to observe performance of each skill. So Scotto owe you've shown us a little bit of questions chart. I'd like to go back through just a little bit and point out a few things if you'd click on that, please. Thank you. So Scott showed you how it is set up. The organization of the questions chart. The column for putting -- writing some notes and comments. I want you to notice, the first questions are some basic information on the student, especially their background, medical information. And as Scott said, we've tried to organize this information pretty much chronologically. So you would think that the skills in the first part of chart are those that should come, maybe, before others. But we know all students are different. If you don't mind scrolling a little bit further down, just to give them an idea, some of these early reflexive skills for example, motor responses. Motor stuff. . Some of the early, early, early skills. We're not going to look at all of them right now. But I want you to see how the child is using different tactile skills in these questions. For example, number 12, do they bring their hands together. We talk about that a lot, can they use both hands. Do they intentionally use touch. Number 13. To make contact with others. As Scott scrolls through here, you'll notice that the skills that we're talking about become a little more complex. When he gets to the end of the chart, there are 32 questions. I'm actually going to see if he'll -- just keep scrolling if you don't mind, Scott. If you want to scroll a little faster, you can. You can see these become a little more complex, using fingers, the whole hand, then fingers, more independent skills. I want you to look at the It's talking about representation Al tactile -- does the child recognize symbols, objects, textures that represent activities and concepts, things that are precursors for the pre-braille stuff. Number 32, getting to recognition of tactile recognition of words and letters. This is pretty much where we stopped this checklist. But I will say that that is our next project. You can't see the faces of my team members and they're going, what, we're doing something else? But yes, we will take this and go on to a pre-braille checklist and we want to expand on this and extend it. But this chart ends there. There is a little section right below that, Scott, that talks about some next steps, I think. There it is. The next steps. So just letting you know where we're thinking about going with this. We certainly value your feedback. Can you get back to the checklist -- the PowerPoint, excuse me. There we go. Next slide. How to use the evaluation resources chart. Scott showed you this as well. Basically, this is what you should use if your answer to any of the questions is don't know. Or for example, if you're not sure if a child has mastered a certain skill. So then you would use the evaluation chart to find a tool that will guide you to that answer. So let's go back to the evaluation resources chart again. Thank you, Scott. He's already explained that the first column, the number and then the second one is just a restatement of the same question and then here's a list of resources that will help you evaluate whether or not a child can do a certain skill. In fact, let's stop on number 3, if you don't mind. There we go. . Is there any information that might indicate the child has experienced highly aversive touch? The question goes on to explain and give examples of things that might cause that. Many of our ROP students, students who are premature or students that have been in the hospital or abused or neglected, developmental trauma, hand over hand technique was used with them and that has certainly, you know, reinforced that averse sif feeling when you're touched. We wanted to make sure you noticed here that this can occur due to isolation associated with a lack of access to sent sensory information. . We wanted to give a little explanation with the question. Then if you're not sure about this one, here are some resources. He pointed out a few of these. What I want owe woe like for you to do now, if you would click on, Scott, the ISLP, the individual individual sensory learning profile that Anthony did. I want you to see some of these are active links where you can actually go to the resource that we have shared here. So you can actually open this up, download it, make a copy of it. Use it with students. As many students as you need. He's just scrolling through to let you see. This is a great resource that I think you will want to use with lots of students in lots of ways. You can make a copy of it to give to other people to use as well. . If you go back to the questions, to the evaluation chart again, look at the -- some of the other resources, if you can click on it again -- oops. I really wanted you to go back to the evaluation chart again. Sorry, I didn't make that very clear. Whoops. Back a slide. I don't know if you can do that. Actually the same thing is true in the instructional resources chart. So while he's getting the PowerPoint back up, I'll keep on -- some of the resources are owe have links that go to where you can order a resource or where you can find it and we will be creating a reference list. I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a minute. Sometimes it is where you can purchase the book. Sometimes it's the author and publisher information. Sometimes it will go directly to the link. To reiterate on this -- about the evaluation resources chart, if you aren't sure whether or not a student can demonstrate a specific skill and generalize it to multiple environments, in other words, your answer is don't know when you're using the evaluation going through the questions chart, then the evaluation column will give you resources to find The information and evaluation resources column can be used to gather additional information about the functioning level of the student related to a specific skill and the resource can help you determine if further evaluation is needed or if the student needs instruction in that particular skill. 

>> Ann. Can I make a comment? 

>> Please do. Then we'll get back to the PowerPoint. 

>> Yes. Sally garlic asked if we could video -- I think Sara said we could videotape. So her comment was ultimately one person doesn't have to be the sole observer. Correct. And we will check to make sure that that says so in the instructions. But yeah, that would be really difficult and almost impossible for just one person to be the sole assessor, evaluator in this document. . It would be a fabulous way -- I do believe we said collaborate, coordinate, collaborate, collaborate with your other OTs, PTs. FLPs in this process and your comes and TBIs need to be working together. That was a great question or a great comment, Sally. Thank you for that. We will make sure that we mention that repeatedly in the instructions. That working with other people is the -- 

>> Thank you. The importance of multiple evaluators and there's so many ways you can do that. Videotaping is great. Actually could provide information, the whole team could review together and just have a team meeting or the OT has videoed the student doing something that impacts the use of their tactile skills throughout their day, at home and school. It could really help show the rest of the team the answers to some of these questions. Thank you. Yes. Thank you, I can't remember who you said asked that question. Yes, absolutely. Videotaping, having as many members of the child's team participate in this checklist using these evaluation resources. The next slide is about instructional resources and the entire team should be involved in this as well. I think it goes without saying, that if your answer to a question is yes, you would go on to the next question. What if your answer is no, they don't have, you know, this skill. . You already know they don't have it. You're sure of that and you don't necessarily need to evaluate that to find out they don't have T it's very obvious to you. Then there's an instructional resources chart that can help you find tools for teaching that skill. The strategies, different activities, methods and materials. So let's look at the instructional resources chart. Like the evaluation chart, it has the same column numbers where it gives the question number. The question is repeated. Then there's a list of instructional resources. If you look at some of the same questions, you can see some of the information. Some things can be used for both evaluation and for instruction. You'll run into that in some of the questions. . How about if you scroll down to number 12 this time. You'll see some of the things -- some of the same material show up that can be so valuable. We tried to include some things that are more well-known in our field, like say the Oregon project, for example. Texas two steps, I think, is well-known. But if you're not a Comcast, you might not be as familiar with Texas -- comes -- does the child bring his or her hands together. We talk a lot about does the child use both hands, going to be a Brayle reader. How important it is to teach them and provide them with lots and lots of opportunities to use both hands. Here's instructional materials that might help with that. There's Texas two steps and Oregon project. Field of curriculum. Some of the other things you may not be as familiar with. If you could click on the motor activities to encourage pre-braille skills, please. This is something Debra Sewell and Chris Stricklandd I don't know how many years ago. It is something on the TSBVI website. You know how our website, sometimes it might take a few minutes to come up. Here is a whole list of things to teach and to work on. Here's ways to teach palmar grasp. Helping them to use their thumb and -- grasp and release. I wanted to scroll through that briefly. That's good. We can go back to the resources chart now -- may not be as easy to go back as I thought. Didn't want to mess all that up. Okay. But to summarize the instructional resources chart, this is the column that contains activities, teaching strategies. For example, another one I want to point out, the active learning space website. That link goes directly to it. You don't necessarily -- you can go to it. We have time? Yep. The active learning space website is so full of information. So there's a lot of stuff talking about the impact of motor development and this is instructional material about things that you can do. The materials listed in the instructional resources column -- you can go back to that now if you can. I don't know how hard that is to do. Some of the stuff in here is to give you additional information. For example, if you look down in number 12, ECC essentials, Millie Smith wrote chapter 5 on sensory efficiency. There's certainly instructional information in there. But there's a lot of basic information on tactile skills, that is good for us to all have. So this column is not only full of ideas and suggestions and materials for instruction, but it's got some basic information about tactile skills as well. Okay? Back to the PowerPoint. The next slide. This is the additional resources packet that Scott mentioned. It says it's in development. Just so that you'll know, the reference list is almost done. It includes references for all the resources in both the evaluations chart and the instructional resources chart. So we felt like it was a pretty comprehensive list of materials and tools and all kinds of stuff. So we have that almost completed. It will be ready soon. . It includes the publication information for everything that's in the charts. And then we're also compiling -- this is not as close to being done yet. A packet of information basic information on tactile skills that we are not sure that other TBIs and comes with which they're familiar. I think that's the correct grammar. I know when I started teaching, I don't know how long ago that was. I didn't know there was a hierarchy of tactile skills and how important for kids to move through every step in that hierarchy. Discovered that what often happened with some of our tactile learners is that we were giving them and expecting them to do things We didn't go back far enough or fill in the tactile skills in between where they were functioning. So we're hoping that this checklist will help all of you create a tactile profile for your student. So Debra is going to explain in the next slide, I believe, some ways that you can provide us some feedback and you can use this chart for your students. Debra? 

>> Oh, thank you, Ann. What we would like for you to do, if you have a student for whom you think this profile might provide instructional guidance, we would like for you to download the handouts and use the questions chart, the tactile profile and then also refer to the evaluation chart and/or the instructional activities chart. . There was a message in the chat from Kathleen said that the link for the handouts is not working. So I'm hoping that that's not prevalent here and that y'all can get to those handouts. What we would like for to you do if you have a student you want to use this with is download the profile and use the other two charts as well to help you come up with the tactile profile and then go look on the evaluation piece and then look on the instructional chart, the instructional activities chart. . Just give us feedback about whether or not you think that this would work with your kids or other kids. Probably you don't -- we don't really want you to do it on more than one to give us the feedback. But you probably have multiple kids that you could use this profile, multiple students, you could use this profile for. 

>> I'm so sorry to sbupt. This is Kate. There are people that were able to access the resources, the handout. I will put my email in the chat. If you cannot get that to open, accepted me an email. I will just send you the documents. Okay? 

>> Thank you so much, Kate. Appreciate it. Okay. So I think that I would like to go ahead. -- my name is on Dr. Debra Sewell, curriculum director at TSBVI. If you decide you want to do this profile with one of your students, you can send us the feedback on the completed chart or any information you have. Scott, if you'll go to the next slide, this is kind of what we want in your feedback. So you can type this into the chat now. If you want to as we've been going throught you haven't had a lot of time to look at it and analyze it. But here are the types of things that we want your feedback on. Question number one, is the purpose of the document clear? Question number 2, are the directions clear? Question number 3, are the questions comprehensive? Are there any glaring omissions? Did we leave any big giant chunks out of this profile? And do you have any other suggestions or questions for us? So if you could -- put those in the chat right now if you want to. What we'd real like you to do is download the profile, the chart itself with the questions and the other two charts and then give us feedback on -- regarding these questions that we have asked you on slide 15. And I think there are a couple of questions here. Is this appropriate for more complex learners or those who will or may be learning braille-only? We think it is. We think it's appropriate for more complex learners and you may not get all the way, you know, through yeses to the bottom of the chart, but we do want you to complete the whole chart. Because they might, like Ann said earlier, they might have splinter skills. Yes, it's appropriate for more complex learners as Sara just said. Definitely for those who may be learning braille. I believe Ann mentioned that our next step in this project is to bridge the gap two pre-braille. That will -- we're very excited about that step as well. But the last couple of questions on the profile on the chart sort of are leading to that pre-braille piece of instructions. 

>> Yes. Thank you, Debra. Because that is where we want to go with that. And I want to also add, there are -- student who may have vision, some of our kids who may or may not be classified as print versus braille or whatever, really this profile helps us tease out those skills that all kids need. Regardless of -- especially these early, early, early learners and students who are functioning at a level that I think they've been missed a lot. These are kids we haven't known exactly what to do with. I hate to say it quite that way. 

>> If you will do want to participate in the pilot project and give us feedback on the profiles, please download the profile, the evaluation chart and the instructional activities chart and fill it out to the best of your knowledge and then I guess you could probably then just -- email it to us with your completed version of the profile and also make sure that you answer those four questions that were on the feedback slide. . After you've completed the -- downloaded and completed the profile, please email it back to us and along with your comments about those four questions. 

>> So to draw this to a close -- did you want to say something, Sara? 

>> I did. I thought the question about complex learners, it might really help you find a good assessment for those learners in multiple areas. Not just tactile skills. So it could be helpful for somebody who is developmentally aware to look at it globally. Could be a detective work that leads you down a path that could help with other skill areas as well. 

>> Absolutely. In fact, a final slide, if you'll notice the final slide has our contact information. Here are our email addresses. We hope that you will contact us with your feedback, contact Debra, if you want to participate in a pilot project. 

>> Just use the forms. You don't necessarily have to contact me. Just use the forms that are in there and then send them to me. 

>> Okay. We're really hoping that this document will be a valuable tool for all of you when evaluating and teaching those toouds and want to reiterate who we're talking about to sum this up. Those nontraditional tactile learners is a phrase we've started using. Students considered non-readers, students who have struggled with acquisition of tactile skills. They could be young or old. We're not just talking about lit I bitty kids. It would be students for whom other evaluations haven't provided meaningful or accurate information. We're hoping it's a tool to create a tactile profile for your student that will help guide their future educational program. The skills in the questions chart are the foundational skills for pre-braille instruction. That's where we're going next. . Mastering them will be crucial for students in their path to tactile literacy. Our next step will be that pre-braille piece to add on to the next part of this project. Please contact us. We'd appreciate your feedback. We definitely appreciate y'all being here. 

>> There was a participant who asked, do they need to get the parents' permission or just include the child's name? I think that you probably are going to need to follow your district guidelines on the parent permission piece. I mean, it is not a full-blown assessment of any sort. It is sort of like -- 

>> It's to help guide your evaluation. 

>> Sara just answered that it can help guide your LMA. This is for the students multipli impaired, this would be a fabulous way to guide your LMA. 

>> It doesn't determine all of that. A great piece of it. There's really good evaluation tools in here to help you when you're doing that LNA. All the areas of the ECC when you're doing the ongoing evaluation. 

>> I'm so sorry. I have to jump in and wrap up so that we can get the closing announcements out before we need to. Thank you so much to Debra Sewell and Ann Adkins, Sara Kitchen and Scott Baltisberger. I'm having a hard time pronouncing names today. Thank you to the four of you so much. This is such an exciting project. We're so excited to see it come to fruition and become a usable tool. Thank you so much for sharing. . Let me share with you the closing code for today. Then please make sure you stick around for some announcements about next week. So the code for today is 042221. I am putting that in the chat. Again, 042221. We have a special session on Monday, April 26th that will be held at 10:00 a.m. central time. This is different than we usually do. So April 26th. 10:00 a.m. central time. We are holding it early because TBI Scotland is coming back for part 2. We talked about optimizing support for children with TBI. This is with professor Gordon Dutton and Helen sclair from Scotland. We didn't want them to present at midnight, which is why we're holding it at 10:00 a.m. There will be a Q and A portion within that session. I'm going to put a link in the chat. If you would like to submit a question. . You can put that in this Google doc or this Google form and they will try to answer as many questions as they can. Next Thursday, we will have another special session for our western regional early intervention conference talking about serving children birth to three in our indigenous communities. That will be on Thursday next week. We'll start, again, an hour early at 11:00 a.m. This is going to be a really neat and special session so we encourage you to join us for that. . On May 3rd, we'll have early num -- ray Ellis and Kathy Garza. On May 6th we'll be talking about the chrome bots on the chrome book. Please go to our coffee hour website to register for those. To obtain your CEUs, you will respond to the evaluation, the code one more time is 042221. In that evaluation. Please let us know if you have any topic requests. Thanks for spending time with us and see you on Monday at 10:00 a.m. central time. Thanks everyone. 

>> Thank you very much.