TRANSCRIPT - TSBVI Coffee Hour: Utilizing CViConnect to Provide Access for Learners with CVI Ð 4-11-22 

>>Stephanie: Okay. I have a variety of different pieces of technology that I have included into today's presentation as well as some slides that are just basic notes for you to keep in mind. But there's a lot of content for us to get through and hopefully make it meaningful for wherever you are on your CVI journey. The big goals were understanding how to locate those images that we use a lot of times when we're talking about things on technology, how to create new activities, what different platforms you can use for that, as well as make sure that all your modifications align for your students' needs. CVI is the leading cause of visual impairment in young children living in the western hemisphere and according to babiescount.org which doesn't include all of the states but is a pretty good rough idea of where we're at. Approximately 30 to 40 students of children with visual impairments have CVI so it's definitely a big impact and a lot of the TVIs I talk to, as the more information is getting out there, their case loads are definitely increase for kids with CVI. More and more numbers are reflecting this where they have 30% to 40% of kids on their case load, if not more, have CVI. As a reminder, when I am doing presentations and talking on behalf of children with CVI, I'm primarily thinking of Dr. Roman's criteria for this diagnosis. So the reason being is that these are the students that I've worked with. The kids that I saw in practice as a teacher for the visually impaired met these criteria and this is how I implemented it. So this is where my experiences come from, not to say that the other information that's out there isn't valuable, this is just what I can speak to from my experience. So those three elements that we're looking for are kiddos that have an eye exam that doesn't explain their functional use of vision. They have a history of a brain condition or trauma associated with CVI. And then they also are going to have the presence of those visual and behavior characteristics. Now, as I reveal these visual and behavioral characteristics that most of you are pretty familiar with, the reason I do it in this reveal kind of manner is to utilize the technology to show you one way that you can use technology in a variety of formats in animation kind of way to bring attention to different things. So this isn't a new thing to just kids with CVI. PowerPoint and presentation materials have had these types of features in their systems and technology for a long time. We're just utilizing it specifically for our kiddos with CVI. Things like color preference. You might add light and movement by adding a fireworks effect to it or using color to highlight the word in a specific way. Movement. You can kind of fly in the word and make it spin around a little bit to bring your attention to it. Visual latency, slow down the movement to meet my learner's needs or make it continually go on for a little bit longer so that it allows them to catch up. Visual field preferences. Making sure that I'm bringing the content. [ Background noise ] Difficulty with visual complexity. It's always important for us to remember where and how we use sounds and how they are activated is really important for our learners. The need for light. Difficulty with distance viewing. Atypical visual reflexes. Now, remember, this is pretty much the only time we're going to talk about this characteristic because it doesn't require an accommodation. Then we have difficulty with visual novelty and last but not least the absence of a visually guided reach. We're going to go through these characteristics as they relate to things with technology and kind of give you examples of each as we go through. But it was just kind of a fun way to reveal those characteristics for you. Now, most of you I think -- I see some familiar names at least from part 1, so if you weren't in Part 1 there was a first first that we talked about the CVI range, the results that you get, how your student gets that score from a zero to 10 along the CVI range you're going to report both scores, rating one and rating two. That's ultimately going to put your student into Phase I, II, or III. We focused heavily on making sure that you're meeting those goals for your learner with CVI. So just as a reminder that students who score a zero to 3 on the range are going to be in Phase I and the goal here is to build consistent visual behavior. A student who scores above a 3 to a 7 is in Phase II and here the goal is to integrate vision with function and we tend to see a lot of kids hang out in this area for quite a long time. Phase II has a lot of things that we require from a child before they can bump up into that Phase III realm so even in that higher end of Phase II we tend to see kids might last there a little bit longer than in Phase I, for example. But then we move into Phase III, which is a score above a 7, to that hypothetical 10, where the goal is to facilitate the refinement of the characteristics and here we're trying to help learn compensatory skills and advocacy for different scenarios in understanding how can I piece apart what I already know about different things with my vision and how can I make sense out of what I am being exposed to. It's really important for all learners, regardless of what phase they're in, they we remember that mere exposure to visual input is not a sufficient for individuals with CVI. That's a quote from Dr. Roman's text. It's important that when we're given that assigned task from our educational team, whether that's your classroom teacher or your TVI or a therapist that you're working with or just something that you want to achieve at home, whatever that assigned task is that you want the child to complete, first you need to figure out with that content, whatever that activity is, do we need to modify it at all? Do I need to change the expectation on how they are going to complete it? Once that's completed, now we're going to start accommodating the activity to align with their vision needs and that's a lot of what we focused on during that first session. The next thing we're going to get into is this -- the arrows leading into, okay, what comes next. That's where we are today. What comes next after we have accommodated this image or the text and the content that we're sharing. So the first thing that we have to do is we've got to consider what learning modality is most appropriate and I would even say I would go back to this slide. This sensory balance information should come before your alignment because whatever accommodations you make need to be geared towards your learning media assessment results. So in our field we need to determine that what our kids need. So are they going to be learning this material visually, auditorially or tactually. And those are our three choices that we're looking at. As professionals we're going to do this learning media assessment and kind of get an idea of what the child needs. For a child with an ocular loss this typically looks like this is their primary learning modality is tactile and their second might be auditory. For kids with CVI it looks a little bit different. Instead of having a primary and a secondary, instead it's about kind of this fluid give and take throughout their day. And so this sensory balance textbook released was from Dr. Roman and Matt Tietjen. They released that in 2020 and they even have some training material I believe available on Perkins' website but I could be wrong. And I would be happy to find that if anyone needs. I can pull up the link and send I want out afterwards. So when you have this you might find that -- you might say, okay, during math we want them to use their vision or during science we really want the child to use their vision. But have you thought about how are they getting their materials? If the aren't stored in their desk at their seat, maybe they're on a shelf. How are they getting those materials and finding them from wherever they are on the shelf an bringing them back to their seat. If they have to go to their locker and then they have to put it back in there or maybe they have to put it in their mailbox to go home for the day. All of these things are things we want to have our students do to build their independence as much as possible. And whatever that looks like we need to decide are they completing the mailbox task auditorily, visually, or tactually. Like every little detail needs to be broken down so even just so much as getting out their talker or whatever it may be, is that something that's assisted, is that something they're doing independently? What does that look like? And so for every kid in every moment of the day that's going to be very different. So it's important to kind of like remember that this learning modality thing is very fluid through the a kid's day and it's about balancing it to make sure that your learner doesn't have vision, vision, vision, vision, vision, auditory. Vision, vision, vision. Because that day of a schedule would be really overwhelming for a kid. They're going to be visually drained. It's referred to often in the CVI world like a visual battery. So if you are using your phone constantly throughout your day then you never plug it back in, by the end of the day it's going to drain a lot faster than if you kind of saved it a little bit and then you only used it here and there throughout the day. By the end your battery's a little bit stronger. So the same thing goes with the child's vision. The more we're expecting them to use that vision without a break is going to be a little bit more taxing for them so we need to make that fluid schedule throughout the day. Also interestingly, Dr. Roman and Matt Tietjen made this chart that I have on the screen where you'll notice that a lot of kids in Phase I, while it's still fluid, we still need to give them opportunities to use vision, you'll see in the bottom that the amount of vision opportunities they have aren't as great as that tactile and auditory access because when you're looking at a learner's day, most of the things that they're completing they're going to be completing using tactile and auditory access but they still have time and something in their routine to use vision. But then as they progress through the CVI range and they continue to grow, we're going to expect that that time that they're going to need to use their vision for learning is going to grow. That time for vision for tasks is going to be more. We're going to put more of an emphasis on vision for learning. Depending on what study you look at, 80% to 90% of what we do throughout our day is visual material so that's what we want to work towards so that they have access to the visual world around them. We live in this visual, visual world that if they can have access to that, that is what we want them to achieve. If they can't because they were working towards that the best condition they can get based on their ocular loss, that's fine too. We're going to meet that in the middle and make that work as best as possible for our learners. The other thing that's really important to keep in mind is that in order to kind of make this schedule throughout your day work, we have to keep in mind this complexity framework. Now, Matt Tietjen has a portion of the advanced principles textbook. It discusses this and goes into more depth. I'm not expecting you to look at these charts and understand it but I just have these as images as kind of like reference points for you. But these are really helpful in understanding, you know, what is it that I'm expecting from my learner? I can't give them a frustrational task and even put it in a minimally complex environment and think that it's a minimally complex environment. They're going to be just fine. It doesn't work like that. We have to make sure we're balancing it between both the environment and the task that is asked of the child. And the same goes the other way. I can't have an extreme environment where they're in the lunchroom and it's loud and there's lots going on but then give them a task that is considered comfortable visually and expect that they're going to be able to attend to it. Let's say, for example, a child is at home and they can easily get into their lunchbox and open it and do something like that visually but when they go to lunch they freeze and can't do it. They might be overwhelmed by the visual and sensory environment. It's just too much for them. Here's another example. Here's a little girl who has a workbook in front of her and it's typical preschool workbook that they've been asked to complete. It's got sight words that she's familiar with on it and the whole background is completely -- has the trifold board in front of her. It's quiet, you'll hear in a video in a second, and here's her response to this task that we're expecting of her. [ Crying ] 

>>Stephanie: So in this situation, while the environment is definitely in that minimally complex area, the task is frustrational for her and it's not going to work. But instead if we were to flip this arn and now give her a task that's comfortable in an environment that's considered a moderate level and she's on her couch in her living room. It's an area that she's familiar with. This was during COVID so the room is sitting in front of her. She has the view of the room but nothing is blacked out. There's toys picked up but nothing's preventing her from looking across the room and seeing the couch that's across from her, other shelves and stuff like that that are around the house. But those are all familiar to her and this environment is very much a moderate level for her. But, again, this task is considered comfortable. She's familiar with this activity and she knows what's expected of her. 

>>Can you show me what we do with the word "can"? 

>>Right here. 

>>Yeah, can you do that? 

>>Yeah. 

>>Good. Drag it in there. Drag it towards its puzzle piece. 

>>Stephanie: She's thinking, why are you recording me this time. 

>>Let's practice the word "the." Drag it for me. Good job. Press the next page. Good. Do you see any more "thes" on the page? Okay. If you see any that are not "the," can you drag it up to the not sign. That's a no. It's a circle with a line through it. Like for the example, is this the word "the"? 

>>Stephanie: I'm going to fast forward a little bit in this video because I love this part here. 

>>What do you notice about the beginning of this word? Yeah, that is the T. Is this a capital T like it is in the first version of the word the or is it lowercase? 

>>Lowercase? 

>>It looks a little bit different but it's still the word -- 

>>The. 

>>Good. Go ahead and press the next page. Let's see if we can find the word "the." 

>>Stephanie: She continues to sort her words as she goes through it. And this is an example of one of the activities in CVI Connect and she's familiar with this. They have it at home. They have it at school and she knows how to sort her words. I loved that when we looked at the beginning of the word "the" that she gave me the sound that it represents. And then later we talked about uppercase and lowercase and she was right there with me during that learning and that is something that brings us back to this page of what do we have to do once we've accommodated it? Because not all kids with that version, that accommodated task works for them. That's only for her level where she's at that met her needs. But it works because we provided the instruction to it as well. I had the conversation with her about the knot symbol, what does it look like? We talked about the shape of the letters. All that is important in order for a child to have access. A child with CVI needs that explicit instruction in order to make sure that they have accessible materials. So for those of you who are TVIs, I see some families that are on here too, but when we're teachers for the visually impaired and we're coming into a school or a family's home and we're working with different individuals maybe who are Braille readers. We wouldn't ever dream of just dropping off a bunch of things from the American printing house or any other company that we got products from that were in Braille and be like, here you go. It's Braille. See you later. Bye. That's access for them. It's in Braille and that's their learning modality. It doesn't work like that. We have to provide explicit instructions, direct instructions for how to learn the Braille code and understand what it is. Just like a sighted kid would learn how to read the words and the print and everything going on in the classroom. Kids with CVI are no different. They require that explicit instruction in order for them to understand the display that is being shown to them. They need to understand that and be taught what is going on and what's expected for them. You need to have those conversations with the kid and work through what's happening here. So one way you can do that -- here we go. Is by moving forward with our characteristics and our technology. So we're going to talk a little bit about the different characteristics. Like I said I have these slides in here as a reminder for you of how you can pair materials and things like that. But we're going to kind of jump ahead to the examples and I'm going to talk about how we're considering light and novelty in these images here. Okay. So using something that is backlit is, you know, kind of an automatic, like, I'm going to be having light feature in some way, shape, or form. Yep, I've got a tablet. I've got a laptop or I've got a monitor of some kind. Cool, I have met that lighting but it's about being purposeful again for that student's individual needs. So, remember the light that's being emitted from a screen is often this white light. So if you are looking at this presentation you're seeing a lot of light being emitted from my white screen that I have going on. If I were to have a completely black background and only one image on there that had that light coming through, the light is going to be focused or kind of like isolated in that one area where all the black is dull around it, which makes it a little bit easier for your student to focus on exactly where you want them to instead of, especially in that early Phase II where it's like, oh, this bright light is coming through and they might not be looking at the specific target that you had intended for them to look at. They might be regarding this great big emitting screen but they might not really be regarding exactly what you wanted them to be looking at. Okay. And then when we look at novelty and we search Google or go in there and maybe we're going to unsplash.com where you can look up cool images and maybe you want to find ice cream and you want to find something that's relatable to your child. Remember, it needs to be familiar to them. When I'm looking through the images seen on the screen here, a lot of these aren't as maybe CVI friendly as some of the others. My personal favorite is showing off this beautiful bouquet. It literally has the mint in there for the leaves and I don't know about you guys but that looks delicious. I would love to have that but when I get an ice cream that's not what it looks like. And then also this other one that's like towering on top of each other where you just have stacks and stacks of ice cream. And I'm sure my children would absolutely love it if that was the ice cream that we were going to go get. But it's also about being purposeful with your activity, right, because in this example the activity that I'm actually working on with the student is I want them to determine where items go in their house once they come home from grocery shopping. So if we were to have ice cream, where does it go in your house? Does it go in your fridge? Does it go in your pantry, your freezer? Where do you put ice cream? And that's the activity I'm essentially creating with them. Ice cream was my original search isn't valuable because that's not what ice cream looks like when I go to put it in my house. So then I changed my search to cartons of ice cream and I got different variations of what you see on the screen. You can see some abstract images. I have this one that has like the entire freezer door visible here and I've got the Ben & Jerry's with the lid off. I have these on top of each other. Just a lot of things going on. And realistically I thought one thing, I need to pick the kind of ice cream that is familiar for my learner because that's the kind of ice cream they buy at their house. Number two, while this freezer door image might be helpful if I was working on, say, an orientation and mobility lesson. Let's say we were going to the grocery store and I want them to find the freezer we're going to. Instead of it being a Google search it's me taking the pictures of what we're going to see when we go there. That's a whole different purpose. See how this all has to be targeted and meaningful for the goal of your activity and what you're trying to achieve with your learner. Now if I'm thinking about the complexity of the object and the array that it's in and the distance that's in it, instead of picking something like this freezer door, which is very realistic and something he might actually see, the purpose of this activity is to say where is the ice cream carton going to go when we get home? And then I'm going to use this image on the right instead. We're going to use this Breyer's carton. That's what he's familiar with so when we get home this high schooler knows where the ice cream goes. A couple of things you can do when you're trying to find those images. There are times when you're going to search it and that's not specific enough so I need to revamp my search. But you can also add a couple other elements to your search to help you find the right image. So when you're searching I always suggest you start with Google images or unsplash.com. That's a site where I believe it's photographers taking pictures of real items all over the place and you don't have to pay for the service but if you're using it as an educator, just tag the photographer so you can add that to the credits of your book or anything like that. Super, really, really cool, clean images. I've loved some of the pictures I have gotten of animals and that on unsplash.com. But the other thing you can do is add the letters PNG in an image search and when you do that's kind of like code or techy for transparent background. And so when you search -- here I searched eggs PNG and now you'll see that none of these have a background associated with them in comparison to the ice cream image where everything just had a variety of things. Some of them were outside. Some of them had this pretty decor background. This is a completely clear background when you're searching for PNG images. That's usually my go to to start when I'm looking for images to create an activity. You might notice some of these have this gray checkerboard behind it. I will say that Google images is not perfect and not all of these, even though they came off of a PNG image find, are still going to have a transparent background. You might download it and it still has that white box behind it. It does make it a little bit easier to remove the background than flowers and chaos behind it but this checkerboard background that's behind it often means that it's a PNG as well. Sometimes it shows that as the invisible part of the background so it's still kind of hit and miss but it's still a little bit easier than searching it in general and getting a ton of information that is visually not relevant for our learner to find the target. The other thing that you can do is use this site, it's called remove.bg. You just type in remove.bg. I always remember it because I want to remove the background. Remove.bg. And here's a video how this works. Go to the site, click "up load image." I'm going to pick an image saved on my computer, in this case a bag of Doritos. It came with that checkered when I originally downloaded it from the Google images. And then I click "download." It's going to remove the background for me. I click download when it's done and then I have an image without any background attached to it. If it does have that white box and you want to get rid of it because you're trying to use a black background or you're trying to make it more realistic so the child can interact, you can use this remove.bg and it takes it to the next step. I love this as well for Word. If you were to use Dr. Roman's, the Roman word bubbling site and you're trying to make it so your text has no background to it, you can use remove.bg when you have taken that image so now when you slide it into that puzzle piece like you guys saw in the word "the" where it could go inside that puzzle piece, it's transparent. It doesn't have a background. It doesn't cover up the outline, it just slides in there like a puzzle piece would. My last resort, but it's still good to know, just in case you're in a pickle, are these background eraser apps. There are several of them available depending on what kind of tablet you have. I personally have an iPad but there are several of them out there if you go into your app store and just search background eraser apps. I will point out a couple key features that I like about the one that I'm currently using. I can just upload an image from my iOS images that I have stored on my device but I have several different ways on here that I can actually modify it. So I can auto try to remove the background and see what happens. I can remove it by color. I can remove it manually and actually go in like an eraser, like you're using 1994 paint that we used to use. You can repair it. So if you make a mistake you can go back and add that color back in. There's an undo button, which it's always nice to be able to undo your work and bring things back. You can zoom in and out and make the eraser different sizes, which is really nice. But my absolute favorite thing about this eraser over several others is that the end has this feather option. Let me see if I can go back so you can see that. So here is this feather option and it has this little bar where I can drag it across and kind of feather the outside of it and what it does is -- if any of you guys have made anything in Paint or any images that you have tried to edit on your own, a lot of times it gives you that jagged pixelated edge and it takes away the element of realism so it makes it feel digital again. But with this feather it cleans up the outside and makes the edges a lot softer so it doesn't feel so pixelated. It just makes my heart happy to have that. And then you can change the background to transparent or white and save it back to your photos. So you can use it in whatever photo you decided to create your content in. So again here are some tips for using color. So let's show -- oh, which background app is the one that you like and use? I'm pretty sure it's just called background eraser. But mine is the light version. This is the question somebody asked in the chat. I just have the free one and so there's an ad that comes up usually every time I want to save an image but I'm willing to let the ad play and hit close and save the image. I'm pretty sure it's just called background eraser. I will try, when we're doing closing codes and stuff, to get the image pulled up and add that for you guys so you guys can see what it looks like on your app store. Will it work on photos, someone asked. So it works on photos that are on your tablet. So if you want to take a picture of something in your house and you wanted to edit it, you can physically go in and remove it. Again, I would start with remove.bg to see what they remove first and then you might have less work to do if you have to go back and undo any more editing. Does that answer your question, Terri? Okay. So when we're looking at color -- Terri, if I didn't answer your questions, feel free to add in anymore detail that I can help answer and I'll come back to it. When we're looking at color it can be something as simple as changing your font color or highlighting to draw attention to the details you want. Remember, I don't want the whole word to be a different color. We've heard on Roman word bubbling and it's a great tool but that doesn't mean that every line of text needs to be -- every word needs to be highlighted. You're going to use that in the beginning of teaching those new words so you can talk about the beginning what it looks like, is it a tall letter or short letter. And the ending of the word and kind of talking about the different features that are in that word but the goal is to be able to remove that highlighting before you continue introducing new words. So if you're looking at teaching a new reader, you might start off with their name or some common things that you're going to be expecting, something that's meaningful in their environment. But as you start to build into reading, you're going to start working into the phonics principles and phonemic awareness and fluency and comprehension, vocabulary. All these areas just as a typically-sighted peer would do at their age. You are going to continue building through and making sure you're using these things. There's not a CVI curriculum for literacy out there so it's definitely going to need to be adapted in meeting your student's needs. But start with the curriculum that your school is using and figure out what works best for your learner to bring attention to the parts of the word or the colors that they need. But, again, on a computer, it really takes no time at all to change a font color. So that's something that can be done on the spot too. If you need to drag attention to the end of the word "show" and put it back to not having it highlighted anymore or they're sounding a word out and you need to change it. There are several reading apps out there that let you change the colors as well for the background and the text. Again, just be careful that your goal is to make certain parts stand out not everything. Because if you have all black background and all red text then it's just a sea of everything looking the same. We need to make sure we're using the color specifically for what needs to stand out for them. Here's another example. The CVI overlay is what Judy Endicott refers to it as when you're applying your CVI characteristics to an active that you're modifying and so this is a sample CVI overlay activity where we are having a student blend these CVC words. They would take and point to each letter or the dot underneath and say f and blending it and dragging it all the way across. Here they would say -- and you can actually see in this activity specifically they were capturing what the child was saying. So they could actually keep track of whether or not the child was reading the word correctly and things like that. But it's all interactive. You have color. This might be for some kids, this activity in itself is way overwhelming. It's too much at one time. You might need to have the letters F, I, and T on a page on its own and maybe the I is a different color. It's nice to separate your consonants and your vowels with different colors for some kiddos so that that I stands out a little bit. The dots underneath were helpful for this specific learner because the hand-eye coordination was a little bit tricky and so it gave them that touchpoint without covering up the letter. Some kiddos we have actually highlighted the dots that are underneath it so they stand out for kids that don't have that visually-guided reach or reaching out and having that control of their arm and their hand. This isn't something they're physically going to be able to do. And so we kind of have the technology to do that for them. But that's also distracting for some kids. So while it works for this kiddo doesn't mean it's going to work for all kids with CVI. We have to be very intentional about how you're using the different combinations for your learner. Here's another example for a literacy example for color. We can use the different-colored fonts to bring attention to different ways to make the A sound in a word. I specifically love this one on the body where plain and play are on top of each other and the AI is in green and the AY is in red. You can show how the whole makes the same sound and even though the AI and AY are a different color and there are different letters here they still make the A sound. The difference is that plain has this consonant on the end to close it and so that's why you're using the AI for a spelling lesson. Instead of the open ended you're going to use the Y. Another thing to keep in mind is your fonts. Here I have this fancy curly A that we often see and when your learner is ready for it you need to make sure you address it. It's no big deal. It's still an A. Still makes the same sound, same rules that the other A that you're used to seeing but it's going to come up as they're reading so it's important that we address it and teach the salient features so they know it's still an A. Here's the way that you could use an activity in technology to sort it. So I have a ton of kids' spelling activities where their AI or A sounding spelling words for the week or those are their new vocabulary words they're working on or that's the sound they're working on. They have to sort them all the time. Okay. We're going to sort all of these into these different categories. Here we created a similar activity in CVI Connect where they would drag the word "rain" up to the AI box. 

>>Yay! 

>>Stephanie: When they did they had a sound that was initiated. And so we could do the same thing on several different pages where we had, you know, now turn the page and now it's day and so it's one word at a time instead of having a worksheet where it's all kinds of words all at the same time but it gives them the word, the target location, and feedback when they get it correct. That's all customizable in the system. So we talked about novelty earlier for things that are familiar for our learners but it's also important to consider what happens if the item that you're taking a picture of or you're using is completely new to the kid. And this is where we talk about salient features. And I know you guys have had a lot of trainings coming through Coffee Hours so I'm going to go ahead and breeze through some of the salient feature discussion but I know you're in good hands because you guys have some well-trained people here that can help you understand this a little bit more if you guys need. But I want to get into the technology a little bit more. So finding out what's meaningful for the learner and showing that for them. So what's salient about the elephant? The floppy ears and the big long trunk. So if that's what we want their attention to, those are the things we're going to use to color highlight. So similarly, how can we use technology to make salient features part of my student or my learner's life? A couple of things you can do are shared documents. So you could use a Google Doc -- there are so many different platforms now for shared documents. Whatever you use in your district works for me. But you could have it listed out where you just have like the name of the item and the salient features that your team has decided work for that learner. You could do the same thing in a presentation format. So PowerPoint, Google Slides, keynote, whatever, share it out with everybody. So as you're teaching new concepts and new things and you have assigned these salient features for your learner, make this ongoing, like, dictionary for your kiddo where this stuff is all available to them and you just keep sharing it. That way you're using the same terminology every single time. No one on the team is going to be using different words and they have to think on the top of their head what it is they want to add. It's all right there like a little script for them. The other thing we do in CVI Connect is right here in the beginning of your activities we have the instructions available to you and oftentimes we will add in those salient features that we found helpful for the activity as like a guide. But, again, because everything is customizable when you create your activities, you can create your own script that says first do this, then say this, then say this, to kind of help coach along the team and help them understand how to present the materials, how long to roughly wait. What am I looking for before I prompt again? Stop talking at all. You know, those kinds of things are also helpful to kind of throw in here in those directions as well. But I found that that was just something really helpful for teams to have those shared resources for what are the salient features that we've been working on and make those available to everybody. You can also, if you're unsure of your salient features and what you are working on -- oh,s I don't have that link in here. There is the salient feature dictionary. And that's a great place to start too. So if you're unsure of what are the salient features of a toothbrush, you could look it up on there and see -- Matt Tietjen's team and his students have come up with an image and salient features that you can get yourself started with. It's a great resource as well. Here is one way we use highlighting and movement to teach salient features. And that is on CVI Connect's drawing board. What we can do is I can add in what we call a drawing board. It's going to start off like a blank square but then I can go into properties and I can just change the picture to anything in my library that I want it to be. So in this case we talked earlier about -- I was doing that activity with my learner where we were talking about where do things go when we get back from the grocery store. So where do things go in the house. And so I have this fridge where the fridge door is opened but the freezer door is closed. I liked that element of it. But I can change the line width, the line color and now when I have my student with me and we're doing that explicit instruction where I'm talking about the salient features of the different parts we're looking at, I can actually outline and talk with my student as we're going through. So I can have all of these conversations and do the highlighting, the movement features of it. I can even have a student draw on here if I wanted to. Just adds that element of instructional practices. Another thing that we did for this activity was phases of the moon and our learner was given this huge worksheet and we instead created this activity where they would click on a specific phase of the moon, the instructions would pop up. You would have the different phase of the moon available, so in this case they chose the waxing crescent moon, and they can draw on the moon to look at the shape and talk about what other things do you think are that shape. What does that shape look like to you. Talking about the vocabulary word. And now again having both available without a color highlighting. Just another element of how you can use technology to create access for your learners. For those of you who don't have CVI Connect, you can still do drawing and highlighting. We use the drawing board but in the iPad there's also the markup feature. Here you can take an image -- here I just took a random picture of stairs from Google images or something. But we're going to pretend like this is our students' staircase at school. We took a picture of it and I really want my students' attention to look at the top of the stairs and the railing and the bottom of the stairs at the railing. I'm going to take my image and use that markup feature. If you didn't see -- go back. In the upper right-hand corner the icon has a circle and it's almost like a pen tip in the middle of it. And so you click on that and it's going to open up your markup feature. You can zoom in and make it real big so you can get nice and close on those details. You can change your marker color and how wide it is, whatever you need. As we're talking about the parts that we're going to look for in the stairs, we can color right on there. And maybe we would actually walk over to the stairs and take yellow tape and put it right on the top of the stairs so that we were bringing our attention to that part when he goes to the stairs he knows to look for the railing and guide himself down. He can look at the bottom of the stairs as well for yellow tape at the bottom and it will show him where the end of the stairs are. So that will be his indicator for the top and bottom of the stairs. But that markup feature can work for any word or picture that you're working on with your student. Again, you can do it on the spot so even if you didn't prepare something ahead of time, you can take a picture of it and make it work. It's okay. The other element, when something is new for a student, is comparative language. When you're trying to figure out that commonality. We have our Venn diagram. If the student knew the toothbrush but needed to learn the spoon. We could say your toothbrush has a long handle and bristles. The common feature is that long handle and so now I can create an activity where, again, the directions give, you know, how long to wait and what to say and things like that. But in the activity, because we've used that drawing board, now we have the familiar and the unfamiliar right next to each other. We can draw on them and show their long handles. We can look at how different they are but how similar they are. You know, kind of use that same terminology that the child is familiar with. And then we can talk about what's different. So our spoon has the scoop and our toothbrush has the bristles. So one thing that I love about the characteristic of movement when it comes to technology is the child's ability to interact with two dimensional as well. So we'll get to that in just a minute. I forgot this one was coming up first. I apologize. This is great when you're bridging that gap from the real item, in this case it was the child's preferred stuffed animal. And we wanted to see if we could get them to regard the two dimensional image on a blacklit device. We had a picture of her favorite cat and we're slowly moving it around on the screen because this speed of movement is what she responded to. Nice and slow and it was kind of cool to see her slowly look over at it and then when she would regard it we would give her her cat. If you look you get it type of thing in the beginning. It was fun. I like doing home visits with kiddos. Here's another way to use color, light, and movement where we actually have the screen recording of the circle being drawn. 

>>A circle is a round line that connects and has no end. 

>>Stephanie: So add that element of movement to an activity. I'm going to skip through some of these for sake of time. I apologize for that. I tried to cut through and only make sure I had what we could get through during today's presentation but I have so much I want to share with you guys. One thing that I love in technology is being able to record my screen because that allows me to adjust for light, color, latency, and movement. You'll see that I'll use color for highlighting. You'll see movement because you'll actually have the color, like me drawing it on there as I'm highlighting it so you have that movement there too. It's backlit. I'm using a black background so the content is emitted through the light I want it to. There's latency too. It's a video being recorded. The student can stop and start it. They can re-watch this as often as they need until it becomes more familiar with them. What's really nice is I have those natural pauses -- I have built into pauses but it's training for those gaps. 

>>An astronomer is a person who studies the sky. The picture shown here is a silhouette of a woman with her hand on a telescope with the night sky in the background. The woman is on the right. Here is her head. And her hand is here on the telescope. The telescope has a rectangular shape to it pointed to the night sky. Usually it's on a tripod or a triangular-shaped legs. Because our solar system is so far away, astronomers use the telescope to magnify the sky, including the stars, making them easier to see. Can you find the astronomer and her telescope in this next picture? Try to draw a rectangle around the astronomer's telescope. 

>>Stephanie: I don't know about you guys but latency is my biggest weakness -- plus I don't like hearing myself on a recording. The whole time that's going on, let's move it along. We don't need to listen to this whole thing but I think it's valuable for you guys to hear it. The pauses in there -- and remember that can be rewatched. We see a lot of our kids that love YouTube videos and things like that. Well, they can watch the same one over and over and it becomes, as they're watching it, you've got lots of movement going on and I cannot -- I have to look at the study. There's a specific study about how often the screen is changing so it's constantly keeping the brain's attention at a more rapid pace than it was when we were kids. And so things are just constantly changing for them. But they can also re-watch the same videos over and over and over and slowly they're going to pick out new details maybe they didn't see before in the video. That's been really cool to see kids progress with that. But I do have some screenshots in your handouts that talk to how you can utilize the iPad screen recording. The first thing you have to do is go in your settings and make sure that in your control header that this screen recording, you're going to press the screen plus so that it pops up into what's in your control center. And then once you've done that you'll do a touch pull down in the right-hand corner and you'll use the circle within a circle icon. It's an open circle with a closed circle inside. And then you'll be able to record your screen as you do whatever app you're doing. So if you're drawing on your iOS markup feature or if you're running an activity in CVI Connect or maybe you're drawing something on a drawing board, you can record all of that and have that available to your learner. We, unfortunately, are running out of time and so I don't have a ton of time to go into my kind of warnings on sound but mindful of the fact that you can still use sound for your learners as like rewards and things like that or recording your voices. So there's system sounds. There's Siri talking. 

>>I see a balloon. 

>>Stephanie: And then you can also record your own voice. Those are just different elements that you can use, again, in lots of programs. CVI Connect is one of them but you can do it in PowerPoint and Keynote and Google Slides as well. That's definitely an element. The last thing I'm going to jump forward here for our last minute before we get cut off is the way CVI Connect activity designer. If you're not familiar when you're creating activities, it's basically a series of if, thens. You add your images in and if you want to make them interactive, you decide what from the if column is going to make what happen from the then column. For example, if the activity was touched, then I want the sound to change. Then I would go to audio-visual and pick a sound that I want from there. Or if it catches an item, then I want it to move to a different activity. Or in this case we had if an item was touched, then I want the letter to move. So essentially the letter Y on the bottom is touched and then it jumps up to the letter Y on the top. So just an easy way for us to provide access for our learners. And I'm going to continue jumping forward really fast, Kaycee, hang on. I know you've got to give the code. And then finally when you're doing these awesome things it's really important to remember to kind of circle back around and actually see how meaningful that activity truly is. So we've created the content. We've aligned it the best that we can but are they looking where we want them to or not? And kind of comparing where their vision is taking place so that data collection is also available in CVI Connect as a use for technology for kids with CVI. So, sorry, Kaycee. I ran over a little bit but I appreciate you letting me finish. 

>>Kaycee: That's perfect. We have a quick questions. Is the app that you're using was CVI Connect? And I think that was right before and maybe during the astronomer piece. I know you showed how you recorded your screen. Were you doing that in CVI Connect? 

>>Stephanie: Yes. And this last page I'll leave up here while Kaycee gives the codes has my business card on it. You can snap that QR code and that will be shared with you so feel free to follow up with me if you have any questions, because I know I went really fast. Feel free to reach out. I would be happy to talk with you. Thanks, everybody.