TRANSCRIPT Ð Multiple Disabilities: APH Products and Resources Ð 4/17/23
>>Tristan: Today we're going to talk about Multiple Disabilities Products and Resources that APH has. I am Tristan Pierce and I'm the product manager. Though most product managers at APH, we kind of do whatever needs to be done. We do kind of have an area of focus, but that's not exclusively what we may be doing, and just because I say I do multiple disabilities and physical education, that doesn't mean another project manager may not be doing something with multiple disabilities and physical education, because we all kind of lend a hand and do everything around here. So, one of the things that I really wanted to talk about and what brought the products about that I'm talking about today is being able to access objects. So, whether you're doing a routine, an activity, a lesson, whatever, you know, those content objects that you may be using may be things that are used while eating or dressing, bathing, or going to bed. They could be used while traveling in a car or participating in circle time. Things used when playing music -- that's always fun to play music. Things found in the refrigerator. And the list can go on and on and on. Of course, I always put toys in all caps because everybody loves toys. So, the thing is that when trying to access some of these objects, it can be a little hard for some of those students with severe multiple disabilities. So, if they can't really see them very well with their eyes or they have limited hand skills, you know, maybe they have cerebral palsy or whatever. What do you do then? And here at APH I have been trying to focus on meeting the needs of some of those kids. So that's a lot of what I'm going to be showing you today. And that conversation to target products like this actually came on an airplane ride. Millie Smith and I were going on an airplane going to El Paso, Texas and we were sitting across the aisle from each other and we got into this whole conversation about those students who really could not see and could not use their hands at all and that there really weren't a lot of products for them. So, at that time decided to make an effort to try to fill that need, if we could. So, the first things I'm going to show you are the three products that really came out of that discussion, and that is the Joy Player, which is a music player that I hope a lot of you have and I hope your students really enjoy it. There's the Spangle Tangle, which is a sister product to the Tangle Toy. And then, of course, the LED Mini-Lite Box, which we have had out for a couple of years now. So, we're going to start off with the APH Joy Player and I have here a back view of the Joy Player because the back shows you all the different ways you can access this. You can put an SD card in it or you can put in a USB drive. Of course, it takes headphones, if you want them. But it also will accommodate external switches. So, if a learner cannot hit -- their motor skill does not allow them to hit the 2-inch button caps on top. Each of those caps are actual switches. If they cannot isolate their fingers to hit one of those, maybe all they can do is swipe sideways or something or maybe they're having to use a foot or anything like that, you can hook in an external switch for every one of the buttons across the top. And that's what those five little jacks are right across the holes in the back. Those each accommodate one of the button switches. And then the two holes there off to the left, that is to accommodate a sip and puff switch. Maybe their only way to operate the player is with their mouth, they can do that as well. And all of these will hook up to also using environmental control unit, so that's also a great plus there. And if you can see where the little legs come down here, those little legs are actually there to accommodate a hook and loop strap to go through there so this will attach to that wheelchair tray. That is one of the big things we were looking for. We know a lot of times in this population if a learner is done with something, they're really done with something and they could just push it right off or pick it up and even throw it. So that strap there is, one, to help keep it on the wheelchair and keep it sturdy and flat and not moving around when they are operating it. But it's also for the educator's safety so they don't get hit with anything. So, our view down at the bottom shows the Joy Player in the front with its chute to help the learner guide and use the cartridge in. If they can get it to that chute, that chute helps guide it in. And then this Joy Player was also looking to take both cognitive complexity and visual complexity off the table if the student had that need. So, you can take off the little rings that go around the button switches and then attach a hard plastic cap so that that particular button switch kind of blends in to the background or the top of the Joy Player. So, it could be you only want to start that learner off with just the play/pause button and you want to cover up all the other buttons. Later on you can introduce, gradually, the other buttons. The Joy Player comes with five music cartridges there. They're blank. These are the same cartridges that NLS uses. They are talking book cartridges by NLS. Then there is the cord that is used to download your music and then there is a recharger to charge the rechargeable battery. There's never any reason to open up the back of the Joy Player -- you can open it up -- but we encourage that you don't do it, just recharge your batteries. They are rechargeable and they're in a pack, kind of wrapped up as a pack. So, a lot of times we'll get Joy Players in for repair and we find out that the rechargeable batteries have been taken out because people just thought the batteries were expended and they put in regular batteries. Yes, you could use a regular battery in there but it's just going to run down very quickly. You'll constantly have to replace them. So, with a lot of APH products, particularly for this population, I just always encourage plugging your stuff up at night before you go home so everything is ready in the morning when you need it. So, like I said, it will strap on to the wheelchair tray. Operates by pressing the extra-large button switches. Operates with the external switches. Has the visual and cognitive complexity blackout caps, the five digital cartridges. And then it's also important to know that it plays WAV files and MP3 files. So, it will not play the digital talking book from the National Library Service. Those are for copyright issues, we cannot have them play this. We're still continuing to look into that and to accept other files. When we do an update to the Joy Player, we will be looking into seeing possibly adding Daisy, MP4s and other things. There could be new things that come along. But these were the two top that were available on the market. And shortly after this came out, a lot of things started downloading more in MP4 which is audio used in videos but a lot of files now are being used as MP4s. So, if you have not accessed our videos online, but we have three videos showing that the Joy Player works all across the board with all ages. We have Joy Player with Dad. That is a toddler. It's the first time that this young learner is seeing a Joy Player and the first time the father is seeing the Joy Player as well. Our second one is just called the Joy Player, which is the first one we made. That's the little Michael you see on your screen. He was an elementary school student doing a Sensory Learning Kit routine for his Joy Player. If you watch that video all the way through you can see how unhappy he is when he doesn't comprehend pressing and really pressing down on those buttons, because he couldn't make the music start. But he was at that function level, you know, he wasn't doing exploration at that point. He was at function level because he knew to grab his teacher's hand and pull her finger over to the button, requesting her, make it play. That's the cognitive piece. He knew how to make that Joy Player work, he just physically couldn't do it yet. And so, the video will show you what she did to eventually get him to understand. And then when he finally does start the music himself, you see why it's called the Joy Player. It just brings such smile and laughter to his face. And if you're wondering why it's called the Joy Player, when I took a prototype down to the Tennessee School for the Blind and had those kids use it, it was the joy on their faces when they realized they could control their own music. They had the power to stop it, start it, change the music. I brought all those photos home I took of them and it was from looking at those photos that we finally came up with the name the Joy Player. Our last video, if your age group is not adults, typically, but you probably have some students in your schools, both your schools, Texas School for the Blind, in the 18 to 21 age, getting near the end of their school time. So, we took the Joy Player to an adult day program and we've got four adults using the Joy Player there as well. And some of them have, do have visual impairment and a lot of them was just the cognitive or motor skill. But this helped them. Really, The Joy Player could help anyone, even someone who has suffered a stroke and they are now having trouble with using their fingers or whatever. This just does provide another opportunity for those people. Why is my screen not advancing? There we go. So here is a closeup showing you how you can take the ring off and screw the cap on. I just wanted to show you a closeup of how that is. That is a hard surface on that button. And then over here -- now you're not going to use your Joy Player with all these things hooked up to it all at the same time, but I just wanted to show you that, yes, a sip and puff switch does hook into the back and an external switch goes into the environmental control unit and you can operate everything with the Joy Player with all these external devices. This is I think my last slide on the Joy Player. I'll see if you guys can see me or not when I hold some stuff up. But this is showing the Joy Player and the Joy Player catalog number, should you need it. And what you're looking at are what we call Joy Player cartridge holders. Now these do not come with the Joy Player. This is something that came about from response from people -- actually filming that adult video as well -- that we noticed it was harder for some people with limited finger movability there for them to really be able to push the cartridge into the Joy Player. These cartridges -- I don't know if you can see how thin they are here. This is very, very thin and so to be able to push and isolate that. And to remove the Joy Player -- I mean, the cartridge -- or from your NLS digital talking book player, put your finger in there to be able to pull it out. And the majority of the population using the Joy Player was not able to get their finger in there to do that. So, we were looking at another way to help with that and that would fit into the chute well. We did design a new cartridge holder and we did field test it. It had good response. But then we realized that we could make a better version if we did it with 3D precinct and just made it as something that you could attach to the existing cartridges. Because if we redesigned the cartridges, they would then become so expensive that not everybody needs this adaptive device. And so, people who didn't need it would be having to pay extra for their cartridges. So, we decided to just continue using the cartridges that are and we designed two different types of cartridge holders. You can see that the yellow in there is like a slide version and the oranges one is as well. But the two shades of blue, they're a little more substantial. They use two big plastic screws to hold that cartridge in. But these cartridges then allow the person using it to either like load it in with their fist to pushing on that back side there. I'll see if you can -- so here I've got two of them here. So here -- they could then use a fist to just even push in if they needed to. And then to remove it we've now got a larger thing that maybe they can get on and to pull with as well, because they couldn't isolate that hole. And we also left on there -- I have to get it up but you can see it on the slide better here. The holes that we left in there. We left those in there, one -- well, for several reasons. One, it takes up less plastic. So, if you're using your 3D printer, you're saving money on plastic by not having to fill all those spaces. But it also allows you with areas that you can attach other things to, maybe a shoestring, ribbon, bands that you could put on to their wrist or their hand in some way that would also allow them to be able to pull the cartridge out. So just some devices that we made hoping that it would help even the smaller population that we already have, that need a Joy Player like this. And these two different styles are available for free from the tactile graphics image library. I'll go into a little bit of that later in the presentation. But I know that someone from Texas was one of my field testers and made some of those. Here it is. If there's a Susan O'Brien watching, this here is your prototype that you sent me right there. I have everybody's name on the back of them. So -- and plus I just love all the colors that people sent in, because it just shows how colorful the Joy Player is as well. Okay. So now I'm going to move into the Spangle Tangle. And this was a product that initially we had the Tangle Toy. And the Tangle Toy comes with its own guidebook with activities you can do. But the problem was that a lot of the kids in this population, if they were given that Tangle Toy and they're in like a reclining wheelchair or anything like that, with their movements oftentimes they would just drop things off their wheelchair tray and that just became very frustrating for them. We wanted to, again, create something that was custom designed for those learners who may be in a wheelchair, a reclining wheelchair, a stander, any other way they may be learning and that we could keep the item within their reach and they would not have that frustration of attempting to do something, only to have it fall away from them and then they would have to wait for someone to come pick it up or they would have to, you know, somehow notify someone in however they do that, to come and help. We created these stands that adhere to a smooth wheelchair tray or a smooth tabletop. I'll kind of hold mine up here, if you can see me here. So, I have a piece of Plexiglass to help replicate. This is the stand and you see the girl with her stand. She is on a reclining wheelchair tray. That helps hold it on. And the Spangle Tangle also comes with the stands for -- I need to be further back for you to see that. We have a tall tube, a short tube, and a medium tube. These can all be used. The guidebook has all kinds of activities that you can do. I know right now this one is set up so that all the smooth rings get put on the tall. If it's half smooth and half tactile, it's on the -- that was the large. This is the small. And then if it's a full tactile ring all the way around, then it would go on the medium. That's just a sorting activity there. So, the Spangle Tangle, as opposed to the colorful Tangle Toy we have, it is targeted more for CVI. It does work with low vision as well. It's that reflective property that some of the students with CVI really seem to like. The skills with the Spangle Tangle are tracking, sorting, problem solving, social, and pre-Braille activities. So, they really encourage movement. This little girl over here, she rarely, rarely opened her eyes and rarely moved but she grasped on to that and she kept flickering her eyelids up while she was doing this, looking at it. She was a learner that lives in a medical facility because of her health. And she -- her teacher said this was one of the things that they could really get her to act, respond, and to attend to and attempt to explore as well. And just playing with the Spangle Tangle is just fun. It's a great stress relief. If you don't have a Tangle Toy or any kind of Tangle Toy, I recommend you get one -- even the little miniatures. They're great to have on your key chain. You're sitting at a red light and you can fiddle around with them. They're really great. Here I'm just showing you two of the activities. It comes with a guidebook for different things. But the Page Turn is one of my favorites. It kind of replicates the doughnut hole. It's four segments of your Tangle Toy. It pops into the table stand and then you can attach other four rings, four segment rings on to it. And those act as your pages. So, trying to learn that skill of, you know, that wrist motion, the twisting of the arm and the wrist when you turn a page, that's what this particular activity is geared towards. And the next toy we have the Joy Stick. If you have it set up that way, it will actually move back and forth. I might be able to do it with this big one. This big one is not set up for that but I might be able to show you. You see how it will rotate back and forth on the stand like that? You can replicate that. For a student who may one day be progressing into using a motorized chair or something like that, this gives them that movement to go sideways, back and forth, whatever like they would with a joystick or something on their chair. So, these are a couple of field testers that we had. This little girl here is doing Rocking Round Robin. And the little boy is doing stacking. Now the Rocking Round Robin -- she's playing on her own so she's just going around and making them rock and she's having a good time. But I'm going to try to set this up. Let's say you had a group of kids and maybe they were all in a wheelchair but not all of them, maybe. I don't know if you guys are going to be able to see these or not. So, the whole idea behind the rocker is to put the tactile part on the actual rocking part. You don't really have to have the tactile here but you really need it on the rocking part. And of course the black segments are all smooth. So, the black is smooth. The blue is the alligator texture. The red is the spiral. I incorporated the white here with the black hoping you could see it better, but the white has the tire tread texture on the bottom. And then yellow has the bumps. So, I practiced taking a board and trying to smack all of these at the same time so you could actually watch them, but I wasn't very good at doing that. But the idea behind it is that every kid has a rocker with a different tactile property on the actual rocking part. When you say go, they all smack their rocker. And the thing is -- the goal of the game is to see whose rocker can rock the longest. And once they stop and the winner is declared for that round, everyone passes their rocker to the left or the right and you repeat the game and you just take score as to whose rocker rocks the longest. Now, I will tell you that the bumps and the spiral are going to stop first because they've got the strongest friction to have to rock against. And of course your smooth is always going to rock the longest. But now that will depend on the student who is doing the smacking. So, you know, if a student who barely has much movement, they barely move that. But somebody else smacks that one like that, who knows. Maybe a spiral could beat a smooth. It's just a fun game and one of my favorite, favorite games is Tangle Toy Relay. And that's when kids are divided into teams and they have a box at the end of the other side. And all the segments of the toy, the Spangle Tangle and Tangle Toy are in that box, and you put a portable sound source at the end of the box. You have two teams and everybody has to wear eye shades so everyone is equal there. And each team has two colors with two textures. So, you could have a -- let's say a red and yellow team and you could have a blue and white team. And their goal is that they have to use their sound vocalization skills to get down to the box where the segments are. If you're the red and yellow team and you need the red segment yet, you bring back a red segment, tap your teammate. As they run down to the sound source, the next segment they're going to get is the yellow segment. And so, while one person is running down -- two different team members are running down to get their segment. The two team members are popping their toys together. Their goal could be they have to build their Tangle Toy so it's alternating two colors. Red, yellow, red, yellow. Not only do they have to do their sound vocalization skills, they have to locate tactually the segment they're looking for. Come back to their team and then properly put them in the right order. Whoever completes their loop first ones the game. I've got some great photos. The photos are pretty cute. Here I'm showing the Spangle Tangle and the Tangle Toy together. I call them sister products. And at the bottom there I have a photo inserted where I'm mixing the two. So, let's say if you've got a student with CVI and they are very attacked to those reflective properties but it's time that you moved them into a little more visual complexity and adding a color, a second color. Of course, they always say with CVI what's the preferred color. I just put a red one in there because I thought it looked good in the photography. I added one red segment with the silver segment. You can manipulate tangle toys and Spangle Tangle. You can create them so they do tactile tracking with their fingers along there. Then we even have some arts and crafts you can make with them in the back. And that's a lot of fun. I call one of them -- instead of sidewalk chalk drawing, I call them like, you know, it's a sidewalk tangle artwork or something. You could pop the segments apart and create pieces of art on the floor with them. There are a lot of good photos in the book there, if you're looking at it. Let's see here. Now we're looking at the LED Mini-Lite Box. So, you may be asking why did APH redesign the Mini-Lite Box that we had had for many, many years. It was it are several reasons. So, one, fluorescent tubes were becoming obsolete because the more energy-efficient LEDs were gaining preference with consumers everywhere in the world. Which made it harder to get the fluorescent tubes. Plus, APH, we support the U.S. government's initiative to phase out fluorescent lights. We followed the initiative to do that. Also, it's not uncommon -- teachers send in messages to APH all the time or people will submit product submission ideas. So, I had a teacher one-time request that we create a universal mounting stand that could hold the Lite Box. And we looked into it. I spent two years going around to conferences, talking to people who make stands, doing all kinds of stuff. And APH realized that we are not in the stand manufacturing business. That is a very unique business, being able to make all of those accommodations in a lot of metal and interchangeable parts. So, we really felt it was best that we did not go into that market. And we could never competitively compete with those companies that have a million different pieces and parts that interchange with their mounts. And we would be trying to make one and the cost -- we just never ever would be able to compete. So, we looked into existing things that were out there and, you know, the Lite Box is too heavy. So, between needing to switch to LED and realizing that we needed a lighter weight that could be used with some commercial mounts out there, that was what drove us to redesign the Lite Box. So, the photo that I'm showing here is a little girl and she is using it with the stand that comes on the Lite Box. So, you know, we always incorporate it some way, having a tabletop stand on the Lite Box, both the large Lite Box and the Mini-Lite Box. That's what we've got here and that's what this little girl -- she's on a bean bag in a prone position and that works really well for her. So, she's using the stand that when you take it out of the box, this is the stand you get with it. And it does -- I think it has six positions. We have changed the stand since the Lite Box came out. So, but, yeah. You still could use it regular tabletop like you have always used it. This is the Mount'n Mover mount. APH does not sell mounts so you cannot buy this mount from APH. You would have to go to Mount'n Mover. We have a link on the LED Mini-Lite Box shopping page so you can go straight to that shopping page and you can click and find the Mount'n Mover, if this is the one for you. This one is what I call the Cadillac of all the mounts. You can see -- see if my mouse will show up on this mouse. Right here you can see this is what they call the shoulder. This is the elbow. And up here, closer to where the Lite Box is mounted, is the wrist. All of those move. They can love in position with these little teeth you can see right here. But if you just push that white lever down, the elbow and the shoulders, they move around as much as you want. And then it's very hard to find -- maybe this little black thing you see sticking out right here. That's the saddle that allows this to swivel and pivot at the wrist, so it can swivel around. Here we show it on a wheelchair. We show it on a tabletop and we show it on a floor stand. Like I said, this truly is the Cadillac of them all. It is American made in Minnesota. Minneapolis, Minnesota. I encourage anyone to take a look there if you're needing a mount. Next, we have the Rehadapt mount. That is a German-made mount but they have offices here in the United States. They sell in the U.S. and they're at all the tech conferences, always. It is also a very big mount. I'm showing you here just on a tabletop but it also goes on to a wheelchair and other areas. Rehadapt, you can buy different sections. They sell different components. All of this put on together is called the clamp-on mount. You can see how it attaches to the back of Lite Box. This is there. This here is part of their Rehadapt. And, again, there is a link. If you want just the clamp-on mount, exactly as shown here, there is a link on the APH website. This one is a little unusual and this is the economy one. It's not very expensive. It's not as versatile as the other two. If you sat this on a table and you put your suction cups on a table, it's not going to be that much higher than your actual table, really, so it may not suit your purposes there. What I do like about this is this mount, this RAM mount, was designed to be used in moving vehicles. This attaches to your car window so if you have someone sitting in a van, wheelchair, whatever, you can attach this to their window and they can attach the bracket for using their tablet. This is on just a glass wall at APH but one of the things I say that if you have a particular room or a location, an area in your school where you do all the Lite Box activities -- maybe you have a Lite Box room, I don't know. But if you have a designated area that your students go to work on the Lite Box, if there's a space on a wall that you could attach a large sheet of plexiglass. You're going to have to attach it to the studs in the wall so it stays stationary. But you could easily just wheel a learner up in the wheelchair or their prone stander or whatever they're using. And you can mark on that plexiglass. This is the height that it needs to stick at, you know, for student A. And this is the height it needs to stick at for student B. And you just use their names. So, when you come in and you just stick this mount right where the students' names are on there. So, it really saves a lot of time. And it's hard. You press on it and that thing really holds tyke. But this mount, this RAM mount you cannot leave up overnight. Just this thing with the temperature changing from morning tonight, the barometer changing, you know, the humidity changing. I can guarantee you that when you come in the next morning that will be on the ground with your Lite Box. It happened to me here in my office and luckily my Lite Box still worked, but I can't guarantee that, okay? So definitely take it down at the end of every session with your student. Okay? You attach it on and then take a good tug on it. Make sure it's good and secure. Then position your student so they can access it. Now, when it is hanging like this, the only movability, you can tilt the Lite Box this way and you can tilt it a little this way but that's the only thing you're going to get. It is a lot less expensive and if you don't need the bells and whistles of the other one, well then I always say don't spend money you don't need to spend money. So now I want to talk about the Ledge with Dycem. Along this road we went down to create a Lite Box that could be more vertical for students who needed it, we also knew that we needed something that some of the Lite Box materials wouldn't just fall off, okay? So we created this little Ledge. This is a very close up so you can see how that Ledge operates. But it just slides on -- just like all the overlay materials for Lite Box, you know, you just slide them on underneath the little lip here or tongue here that hangs out. So it just slides in and slides out but it does accommodate holding these different here. We have the Lite Box cubes, some plexiglass pieces. What also comes -- you can kind of see it in this photo here. You can see the color is slightly different where my mouse is going. And that is a sheet of Dycem, a white translucent Dycem. And it comes with the Ledge. So a lot of materials you can just -- like all the picture cards for the Lite Box, just slap them on that Dycem and they'll stick. And APH -- this Dycem here is custom made for APH to fit both this small mini Ledge and we also have one for the Lite Box and we have a Dycem for that Lite Box as well. After a while, you can watch the Dycem and it gets its stickiness back. The Dycem is a consumable product. It's not going to last forever so you will have to replace your Dycem. We do sell both the small sheets and the large sheets. We sell those as replacement parts for the Ledge. So this is one of my favorite things that I like. I have shown this at -- I think it's called -- yes, it's a webinar I did for APH. You can access it. It's called behind the scenes of the Lite Box story hour. I'll repeat that again if you wanted to write it down. It's behind the scenes of the Lite Box story hour. And in that video I will tell you or show you how you can make some of your own Lite Box materials to go on LED Mini. And so right now I'm going to show this little video and I'll kind of explain to you what it is before I click it. It's very, very short. There's no sound to it, literally. That's why I'm going to explain it. So this is the LED Mini-Lite Box. It's all black. And it is on the Mount'n Mover mount. You know how I told you if you press those levers down or the saddle down and it moves? Well, if you get a piece of art -- I have the apple here from the Lite Box here. If you get that in a learner's preferred viewing area and you're trying to get them to visual track. First get their attention and get them to attend to that. And all the lights are out. All the lights are out in the room. I'm standing in this video but I don't think anybody can see me. I am in this video but I am wearing all black. I have on long black elbow-length gloves. My hand is actually holding the top of the Lite Box around the handle. So lights out, everything is black and the student has -- a teacher in Minnesota taught me to do this when we were field testing. He's also the same one who submitted the idea to have a universal mount made. When I told him -- it's Nick Hatfield. He's a great teacher in Minnesota. When I told him we weren't able to do that but how about if we redesign the LED Mini, he was all on board and he was a field tester for me. He took me all over Minnesota to so many schools. It was great. I'm going to click here and you'll see how you can just make the Lite Box kind of move across -- whoa, what happened? I did it wrong. Let's go back. There it goes. Now the Lite Box is moving in black air so they can attend to the apple and you can make it move back again and see if your student can track, visual track with that object. So in the Lite Box story hour I show them how they can make an airplane. Using the APH Lite Box materials with the picture of the airplane we have, well, we also have the digital Lite Box artwork. We took all the artwork from Lite Box and we turned it digital. And so you can print out that airplane and you can cut it out. I show you how to put it on foam. You put colored tissue paper in your hole and make the black outlines and you put it on the ledge and turn on your Lite Box here and you have an airplane flying through the night sky. There's just all kinds of things you can be creative with to do these. So, okay, so it sits on a table or a desk. It fits on the three commercially-available mounts. This is your recap. Dimmer with the highest brightness level of 8500 lux. Battery life is 6-15 hours depending on brightness. The brighter you are using it, the fewer hours you will get. And it only weighs four pounds and that is key when trying to use it with a mount. There could be other mounts out there than these three, I just know we tested these are the three we found and we tested. We did test some others and they didn't work. If anyone out there discovers another mount that can work with this, please let us know and we will add it to our shopping site. But also take into consideration, if you are finding something and you think it's going to work, think about what you use on a Lite Box. Do you ever use like the APH spinner -- that kind of weighs a bit. The black grid with all the plexiglass cubes, that's each going to add weight. I do encourage you if you find another mount that will hold the light box, please, please, please let APH know. So I'm also going to talk about these are some products that we just use with the other products that I just showed you. So we do both white and black calendar boxes. We call them Expandable Calendar Boxes because you can just start using one, like the photo on the right shows. She's using just a single box as an anticipation box or like a "now" box. And then eventually, once the student learns, of course, they've got the now box. You can add a second box. That's what we mean by expandable. Now you're teaching then and now. Teaching those concepts. Eventually if you can add more, add more. Underneath of it is the -- what is it called? It's called the expandable Calendar Box stabilizer. I was in a classroom in Frisco, Texas and the teacher had four or five boxes connected together and she always had to take them over to where the child's wheelchair was. It was a little -- she had objects in them. So it was a little hard to carry. And so she had taken a piece of cardboard from the box and used it as a support so so she could just lift it with one hand and take it over there. We field tested different ideas other than the cardboard. We tested plexiglass, we tested types of vinyl, but none worked as well as the cardboard. If you get into some of your plastics, they get to be too heavy with the objects you put in the boxes. So carrying that well, one hand was awkward and hard. Some of the vinyls were too flimsy. If you got it thick enough to where it wouldn't wobble on you, it was too heavy. We decided to follow that teacher's road and just use it out of cardboard. We call it a compostable product. When its finally meets its end of life, you can compost it easily enough. Well, take the material off, but you can do that. We always want to give credit when we're talking about our systems. We call it the van Dijk anticipation calendar methodology. We just like to give Dr. Van Dijk his due. He was a wonderful person to get to work with, the short time I got to work with him. But I know he has worked with teachers -- he worked with teachers in Texas for years and years and years. And I will tell you that we are still using the Texas calendars book when we sell these expandable boxes, we are still using the Texas book. We saw no reason for us to reinvent the wheel when you had a perfectly good book available. We are still using your book with that kit. So now then, I think a lot of people in Texas, just because of Millie Smith know about the APH intervention continuum, which starts off with those sensorimotor learners, with the Sensory Learning Kit. Then you move into SAM, symbols and meaning, and then you can move into tactile connections. APH, that was the product we formed the intervention continuum with. Since then we have a second system, stacks, and they could be used with different populations and stuff. I kind of often say that if a student can't generalize, they're probably not ready for stacks. There's no hard research I have on that. But I do know with tactile connections, because it is more of an individualized system, that it is more based on what the student is using then and there and what they know and maybe they know this is their spoon but they may not know you have a spoon and I have a spoon and there's a soup spoon and a serving spoon or there's a green spoon and a blue spoon. I think Millie referred to it. If they are able to generalize, there's no reason they can't use a standardized system and it's what is preferred for that student. I think you maybe need a little more fine motor skills sometimes to use tactile connections versus stacks, because the stacks, they are so large that you can access them with the whole hand, your whole palm and everything. For those students, that's an advantage. But I had a mother and her son come visit APH one day and he walked in with all these tactile connection cards hooked to his belt. He was Deafblind and he sat and communicated with all these connection cards. It was amazing. There's no way he could do that if the cards were any larger. He would have to pull a wagon around with him wherever he went. There are advancing and disadvantages to any system. Since tactile connections came out there have been numerous symbol card systems introduced. Like I said, it just depends on your student, I think. Oh, wait a minute. I have to go back. I have to go back. This is what I wanted to show you. Okay. So the Sensory Learning Kit will soon be changing to sensing and learning. Now I may make some of you very happy right now and I may make some of you very sad. If you'll note sensing and learning does not have the word "kit" after it. There will no longer be a kit. We have decided to focus on the methodology because really using the strategy of these routines can be done with anything. It doesn't have to be done with a pinwheel. It doesn't have to be done with a paint roller, you know. We've always had, in the sensor learning kit book, the teacher's guide, a menu in the back giving you ideas of different items you can use for making these routines and getting a learner's attention. So with the Sensory Learning Kit we had used attention exploration and partial participation. The new sensing and learning, which comes out of the Sensory Learning Kit being used since 2005 -- so it's been in use a long time. During that time, Millie continued to work with teachers doing consulting work, being hired by different school districts to come in. Over the years she collected more and more information. And so that is what is now being presented in sensing and learning. So you still have attention. You still have exploration but now we go function. I think a lot of this has been rewritten to really dovetail more with standards, maybe either some state, national, you know, everything. We're trying to get things to be able to work better for you, make your job a little easier. So this is what I'll show you. This is not -- it's not available yet but this is the new book, if you can see it. Down at the bottom here it says Millie Smith and Stacy. Stacy is in Texas and she has joined Millie on this book. She is one of the teachers we worked with over the years since SLK came out. If you have looked at any of the sensory learning videos that we have online, those kids are either from Frisco, Texas, Comal, Texas, and New Mexico. We would go to New Mexico and do this as well. We hope to have this out very, very soon. It's in pricing right now so I'm just waiting for pricing. If you are one of those people that really, really, really, really want that pinwheel, the bell bracelet, the paint roller, the mirror, those items, then I recommend you -- there's like 50 SLKs left in the warehouse so you better place an order quickly before it's completely gone. If kits are not sold by a time when this comes out, they will probably take those kits away. We'll open them up, take out the items that we can use, and then have to dispose of the other things. So you may be wondering, well, what is going to happen with all those items I used in the SLK. Here I'm showing you. The power select is our environmental control unit. We have always sold that as its own product. You could always buy a power select. So we still have that. We still have the vibrating pad. You could always buy that separate, and you still can. The switch-adapted fan you can buy separate, scallop switch, tactile, and stick switch. The tactile switch has interchangeable plates. So if a student does not like that bumpy plate on there, it's got smooth plates that can accommodate. Or you can put objects and choice making with those plates as well. The stick switch allows you to provide different visual targets. Sometimes I put a red rubber ball on the top of that stick switch and you have T-ball on the wheelchair tray. That T-ball, whenever they hit it, it sets the vibrating pad on or maybe it turns the Joy Player on. You want music, you have to hit the T-ball. The select switch has been around for a while. It's a combination of switch and environmental control unit. And the DC supplement adapter is very new and it connects your vibrating pad and fan to select switch. Of course we will always sell the jumbo work and play tray. I'm running out of time so I just wanted to tell you that APH has so many free things that people don't know about. You're going to get a copy of this PowerPoint. There are two links that show you just all the free stuff we have, okay? It's all free. Just access that. And then also newer stuff. This is older stuffer. Newer stuff, we're putting a lot of manuals and documents for free on the actual shopping page. Just look at your shopping page and see if there's manuals and download tab. If there is, open it. The tactile graphics image library is one of the best things APH ever did. We now have 3D files, STL files. Here you can make a Joy Player button to make a communication card, if you want. You see right here all the files for the Joy Player cartridge holder that I showed you earlier. You can print all of these. And then we also have the image library where you can do embossing or print out things for coloring, low vision, whatever. Here's the airplane I told you about. These are all the Lite Box pictures that you use on the Lite Box. You can download all these pictures for free to make expansion activities to go along with your Lite Box. If you were using the sailboat that day on your Lite Box, print this out and let them have an expansion activity with it. Our outreach services, you can see we have webinars, everything. ELearning, connect center. We do a lot of physical education stuff on the connect center. I encourage that. Thank you.