TRANSCRIPT AI for Practitioners 3-30-2026 >>Donna: As Kaycee said, my name is Dr. Donna Clemens. I am one of the assistive technology consultants here at TSBVI and so excited we can talk about one of my favorite side projects in technology today, and that's artificial intelligence. >>Belinda: I'm Belinda Rudinger. I spent 15 years in the field of students with visual impairments. And fun fact, I have known Donna almost all of those 15 years. We used to work together in the Dallas area, so I'm excited to not only have a chance to talk about AT and now AI but also to work with Donna. We would love -- we already see your city and state. We would love to hear in the chat how you all are already using AI. That can be for work but it can also be for fun stuff, like meal planning. >>Donna: Oh, yes. Meal planning is a great way. And our first example of using AI are these pictures on our introductory slide. We took the pictures on the left and fed them into Nano Banana and are able to tell it what kind of background we wanted and change perspectives and give it some fun. We found some limitations of that. And the difference between a paid subscription versus a free subscription. That does make a difference. Belinda can tell you about her experience with that. It looks like we're doing text to speech support, grammar, travel, planning summer RV trips. Ooh, that sounds fun. And adapting images. Yeah. We do that a lot. >>Belinda: Wonderful. You all are already doing a lot of great things with AI. Yes, we look forward to continuing that discussion. Ooh, I love creating simple CVS slide shows. That's a great use of AI. I was going to say, as Donna was saying, because we all have different levels of access to different AI, sometimes, you know, your friend or colleague gets a result that's better than the result that you got. I had to try a few more times to get myself from my boring work headshot into the forest, which I would rather be in. Whereas it worked a little more seamlessly for Donna, the way we all use AI, it's going to be individualized and based on our own preferences and workflow. >>Donna: And it's great to use it for work and to streamline your process. But you can also use it for fun. And if you've got those students that are a little harder to reach, maybe and want to find that catch, this is an example of something that I did with my husband when we were playing around with some AI features. We took our anniversary picture and a picture of me building our greenhouse on our farm and told it to make plushies of us. That was just a fun thing with Nano Banana that we can use to -- like Kaycee said earlier, to Flat Stanley ourselves around the world in AI. So for our general objectives today, we can identify some practical applications for the AI tools that are available out there. This is not going to be a comprehensive list of tools or what you can do with it. There's so much out there and it's changing daily. How we can apply some AI strategies to creating accessible, engaging, and student-centered learning materials as well as materials for ourselves and exploring approaches for teaching students how to use those AI tools in their own support and lifelong learning. So first we're going to go over workflow and organization. How can we leverage that power of AI to work smarter, not harder. Though every time I say that I think I work smarter and then I still have to work harder. We can look at -- >>Belinda: The smarter you work, then the more time you have for more work. >>Donna: Exactly. That seems to be the way it is. >>Belinda: So I know a lot of people, you know, some people are already using it. Some people are kind of not sure where to start where why they would use it. I think it's fun to think about it in terms of you're having -- you're processing with another brain, basically. When Donna and I put our heads together, whether we do it in person or virtually, we get so much more done and have more fun than when I'm sitting here working by myself on a project. You can think of AI the same way. It's just kind of another pathway for thinking through brainstorming, processing. It can really help when you're stuck. Sometimes you just have writer's block or planter's block or something like that and it can help you get started when your creativity is feeling blocked. A big phrase I hear a lot with people talking about AI is meaning making and sense making. It can make sense and make meaning out of things really fast. It can synthesize content really well and to some extent you can delegate certain tasks, not all. Just like my collaboration professionally with Donna, the more you collaborate with different tools with AI the better you get at it and the more streamlined workflow. We have a picture of two brains and that was courtesy of Napkin AI. >>Donna: You'll see as we go through this presentation some of the different tools we have used to create items. We tried to notate each of those as we worked. And this lovely little graphic, we just had a bulletpoint, because that's what we're used to doing in the same vein of two brains are better than one in collaboration, we can build a community of our AI friends. And each time you're working with AI, it is getting to know your tone. It is getting to know the way you think and the way you process things. And what kind of information you want back. And that has a catch 22 on it because it starts to learn the way you want things back but then it can always kind of hallucinate. It makes up things to fit what you want. So we always still have to be careful and not supersede our professional knowledge with AI without double checking. >>Belinda: I like how you said that, Donna. Because, again, kind of thinking of this as building a community of different friends. You know, there's ChatGPT, there's Gemini, Claude, all these different options and yet over time you kind of figure out who to go to for what. You also start to realize who is trying a little too hard to make you happy to where you might get a hallucination that might sound great but isn't factual. Or some of your AI friends might start rumors that are not actually accurate. Again, like Donna said, we could give you, even if we would have tried to give you a comprehensive list of everything today, it would have been out of date tomorrow because there's new options all the time. And we also recognize that when you're in the school district when you're on campus, there's going to be rules that govern how you use. So certain options may be blocked. Whereas something like Gemini, because it's part of the Google ecosystem, might be more available to you than another option. Yeah, getting kind of good at diversifying and differentiating all of the different tools that you use with AI. >>Donna: Gemini is very good at processing information about Google itself, because it is a Google product. So when I need to ask something of how do I do something in the Google environment, I'll go to Gemini. Because I get a more reliable answer than if I asked our friend Chatty. And it also is geared more towards that educational prep. So I'm able to do a lot of the things that I'm going to talk about in a little bit when it comes to educational documentation and goal planning and things like that. These slides are also AI generated. We had our basic slides with titles and bullet points and such. And there is a neat little -- if you have Enterprise. If you have the paid version of the Google environment, there's a little sidebar that says "beautify this slide." You're like, yes, please. And so it will give you suggestions on how to make things beautiful. Keep in mind, it's going to generate pictures that do not necessarily have alt text to them. So you'll need to go back and check that any pictures generated by AI have appropriate alt text attached to the picture. >>Belinda: Absolutely. We found, in one case when we were checking the alternative text, it just had the name of the prompt that we had used to generate the image. And so a quick checker would have said yes, there is something describing that text but you need to physically check what that text is to make sure it's appropriate and accurate. >>Donna: Awesome. So just remember that we all come with that little bit of baggage and it's important that we have good boundaries with our AI buddies. Fact checking is absolutely essential, because they often hallucinate. They may say, oh, it's a wonderful suggestion to put glue on your pizza. No. Kind of not. Wouldn't be great. I found with crochet patterns and patterns that I'm asking it to generate, they're not always very accurate. I've done some woodworking plans and those weren't so great either. So always check what your AI is giving you back. And it could be that validating those outputs can take longer than actually writing it yourself. So you have to weigh your options of what's going to be the most efficient way to work. And your expertise is not negotiable. New teachers need to build that expertise because AI can't replace that professional growth. They can help you guide along and organize yourself but you still have to have that professional knowledge to be able to gather that. I do have an example in a little bit of SIFTS, and we'll talk about that. That's specifically AT. As an example of something that might look AI generated but is actually just a questionnaire model. And the other thing is AI's bias reflects our human bias. AI is only going to put out what we put in. So if what we've put into it is skewed, then what's going to come out is also going to be skewed. In that same vein, what comes out in AI is obvious. If you know what you're looking for. There are a lot of bolds, a lot of exclamation points. The bar divider in the middle of the page -- it happens quite often. And it uses a lot of emojis. Those types of things can be tailored within your AI environment to tell it not to do that. Because I don't know about anybody else but that gets annoying for me. I don't like all the bold, extra dividers and emojis and such. Just know if you're producing something, it does have obvious tags, for those of us who use AI often, to indicate that it has been generated by AI. >>Belinda: Absolutely. I was going to adjust last week there was a webinar and also a research report that came out from AFB called the AI Quagmire. It goes into more detail on the fact that AI can, like any tool, it can promote more access. And there's amazing things it can do . But it can also -- the phrase that stuck out to me from reading that report, it can also deepen disparity. And so it is really important that we keep all of that in mind as we look at this. I notice that sometimes when I've been using AI to explore scenarios or case studies or generate IEP goals, sometimes it will -- I feel like it's using a lot more deficit language than asset-based language. And so that's just something -- again, as Donna said, you can go in and customize some of those instructions and also you can keep prompting it back to more of what you want. But ultimately, you are spending time preparing things and you're also spending time, on the outside, verifying it and refining it. It's definitely not just going to take the place of you or do the work for you and your expertise is essential throughout the whole process. >>Donna: And you can even use AI to generate the prompts for you. You can use your AI friend to craft prompts that will get you the results you want. So flip side of that. But our guiding principles when using our AI is that we want to start with the expertise and validated data. We want to make sure what we're feeding our AI is verified, accurate, and not going to perpetuate myth, misconception, or bias. So we want those things to be validated and move us forward. Using AI as a brainstorming partner, not a decision maker. AI is not in charge. We are in charge. We want them to help us with brainstorming and all of that. And then fact checking. We can collaborate more widely even, because I have taken items that I needed to disseminate and say, okay. This is in teacher language. How do I rephrase this, keeping the same content and put it into more of a family-friendly or a student-friendly language. So that's something I've already created that I then use AI to help me adjust. And making sure that we protect that ground truth. We don't want to feed AI information. So if it was AI generated, we don't want to refeed that and perpetuate that cycle of bad information. And the big red one there is protecting that confidentiality. Personal identifying information, we do not want to feed that into our AI friends. We want to keep that out. We want to protect that confidentiality of our students. So I usually use a placeholder when I'm doing student goals or objectives or analyzing student data. I pull out all of that PII information and hand it over to them then. >>Belinda: Absolutely. These are some examples just of how you can individualize and customize things to make it your own. Because, again, you might have a colleague who uses AI for something you would never use it for. That doesn't mean that AI can't be used in other ways for you. It just means you have to find the way that fits into your own workflow and works for you. So we have the example of you can turn off the overly-positive responses, which I think Donna has done in hers. Or if you just feel like you need some encouragement throughout the day, you can embrace the overly-positive responses. But that is something you can play with and adjust. Again, don't feel like you have to use it like everyone else does. You can, as Donna said, you can have one AI generate a prompt and use that prompt to get more of the results you want somewhere else. But ultimately, just look at how you can use it as another tool in your toolkit that works for you in your way of working, in your preferences. Again, the better you get at how you start a prompt, the better you get in the beginning, the less refinement and work you have to do at the end. >>Kaycee: This is Kaycee. We had a comment from Sara in the chat. She said my agency is using AI to guide rules revision projects to ensure that new rules are using plain language and can be understood by the public. >>Belinda: I love that. What a great example. Thank you, Sarah. I know Copilot can be embedded in free versions of Microsoft but there's, I think, a more enterprise or executive version. Thank you. >>Donna: There is very much a difference between the paid version and the free version. In the amount of limits and things you can use. I use my husband's paid Chatty because his boss said we could use it for personal use. Our friend Chatty behaves very differently when I'm using the paid than it does with the free version. You get answers faster. You get a bit more in-depth, more prompting. It does behave a little bit differently. Let's get into some applications. One of my favorite that I found a couple of years ago -- and I used it for when I was doing my dissertation and when I had to schedule in work and dissertation work and all those crazy things that come with school and work. And it's called reclaim.AI. This is a scheduling assistant that you can integrate with your Google calendar or Outlook calendar and you can have it build habits, schedule tasks. I was like why couldn't I have had this when I was in the field? You can say I need to see this student between this time and this time every single day or every other day. And it will go in and it will plop it into your calendar and it will tell you you have a conflict here. Let's readjust. And so then you're able to schedule in -- like I would schedule in my Braille kiddos first or my kiddos learning Braille. And I would schedule in my ARD meetings and it would find where I needed to fix that. If I had projects, it would say it's going to take me ten hours to finish this assessment and I need ten hours between 8:00 and 4:00 where I can focus on writing this assessment. Or conducting this assessment. And it will find those spots in your schedule. I'm very much a calendar-driven person. If it's not on my calendar, it doesn't happen. So this was a wonderful way for me to build those habits and tasks using Reclaim.AI. So we liked this synergy. The working together of our -- with our AI partners and with our other human partners. Builds that synergy for superior outcomes, not just for us but for our students as well. >>Belinda: So this section is all about instructional planning and how we can use that to, again, work smarter, not harder. But all of the different aspects of what we do as educators in a given day and how we can use different tools that are out there. Part of this we're going to go pretty fast on but they're tools that are in our handout that you can go on and explore and see if they are a good fit for you. >>Donna: We did not include the PowerPoint in our handouts. It is a document-type list of everything we were talking about today. >>Belinda: As we get started, you know, there's so many different things we do as educators from assessment all the way down to transition planning. Moving from your present level statements, goals, objectives, accommodations, and how you plan lessons that are engaging, how you differentiate materials, how you monitor the success your students have having. Specific instruction for the Expanded Core Curriculum and many things we haven't included here. As we continue we would love to see some information in the chat about how you're using AI or how you think AI could be used in one of these areas. >>Donna: In that chat, we had you do that. While you're typing on that, we are going to move forward into -- >>Belinda: So this is kind of a note. I know a lot of times people struggle with how and when to use AI because it seems like it's quote, unquote cheating. And so if instead you think back to, like, education or psychology 101 classes that you took in college. And think about Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development. So in this model or framework, scaffolding is used to meet the student where they are but also have them get practice and move toward things they're not able to do independently yet. And so scaffolding is huge. You can think of AI as providing that scaffolding. You can also think of it in this theory, there's a construct or concept called the more knowledgeable other. And so AI can serve as that more knowledgeable other instead of having to be a colleague or a teacher or someone else. It's just another source that can serve in that role. >>Donna: So if we're looking at that assessment loop, again we have our red caution. That PII stays out. So we can use it in our assessment loop too analyze the data we're getting back. We can cautiously use it to compile, extrapolate, and analyze the information that we've gotten in our assessment. And use it for brainstorming, such as assessment activities. I need to test near vision or immediate vision or distance vision. What kind of activities could I do when it's raining outside and I need to be able to test distant vision. What kind of things can I look for? So it is a nice way to brainstorm. And it looks like Melissa had an example of colleague AI has built-in core standards by grade level and subject. Oh, we need to check out Colleague AI. I haven't tried that yet. So we can -- oh, I'm sorry. >>Belinda: No, you go ahead. I was going to say. So again kind of moving through that whole instructional cycle, starting with looking at your Present Levels of Academic Achievement and Functional Performance. Again, some of these are tools that we're going to hit on but explore pretty briefly, for the sake of time. With your handout, you can explore them and see if they're a good fit for you. >>Donna: And it looks like Sandra takes boring lessons and ask AI to make them more interesting. Absolutely. Creating themes. >>Belinda: That's so good for motivation. >>Donna: So write performance reviews for staff. Yes. Absolutely. Use it as a writing helper. That's what we're going here with the PLAAFP. In our PLAAFP development they have Playground, which Belinda has played with and I have not gotten there yet. >>Belinda: Like Donna said earlier, these are tools where I was like why didn't I have this in the field as a special education teacher and then as a TSVI. Playground IEP lets you process through developing goals. It does have a section where you work through your present level statements. It also has data sheets and everything. I wanted to show some examples. Again, I tried to on purpose give it a horrible prompt in this example. I said my student is bad at math. They are learning Braille and they won't use technology. That doesn't give you a lot of good information to go on. I love that it told me your prompt lacks clarity, quality, and effectiveness. Even if it was someone new rushing through things, it catches you and says we're going to need a little more information to be able to develop this out. So then it gave me five tips for how I could improve myself. And then if you'll go to the next slide, in redrafting it using those tips, I was able to get a much better statement and result from them. Again, that kind of gives an example of how it can also even serve to provide you information, because on purpose I started with a not-great prompt. This website, or the program IEP Playground has some nice information that's tips and tricks for you that they have to help you work more efficiently through their product, which I think is great. >>Donna: It's an example of using the right tool for the right activity. This AI tool in Playground is much better at refining your IEPs and your PLAAFP statements than using our friend Chatty, who won't really guide you in the correct formation. Or give you tips and tricks on how to add more information. >>Belinda: Exactly. I love it has the feedback coach and additional examples to help you, if you're still finding your way in this. Which I think we all still are. We're all kind of improving in how we do prompts. Those are some features I loved about that one. We can move on to the next example. >>Donna: Our next example is goals and objectives. So from having the PLAAFP, we only gave you one tool example there. But there are so many other ways to use that. We were constructing goals and objectives. This time I used Chatty and -- when I say Chatty, it's ChatGPT. We have just started calling it Chatty. And I used Google Gemini and compared the two. They did give me very different outputs. And so I used the smart goal template and trained it on -- I fed it the smart goal template first. And then gave it the framework that I wanted to use. And then gave it the pieces that I wanted. Like, this was a sixth-grade student with low vision using Bookshare and the student needed to score 80% accuracy in navigation to independence. Help me draft goals and objectives for that. And so my Gemini results is what you see on the screen. It's by June 2026 using assistive technology ECC skills. Now I did not prompt it to use the AT ECC skill. I fed it enough that it said of the ECC skills, AT seems to be the most appropriate one so here's the one I chose for your goal. During literacy-based assignments as measured by a specialist observation and data collection log, the student will independently configure reading settings, including text to speech and reverse contrast and navigate bookshare-compatible digital text to located information for answering questions with 80% accuracy on a four out of five trial. We have a lot of ways we can do it. So this was the notes that Gemini generated. It categorized it under AT, as that seemed to be the primary one for high-tech reading tools. It combined setup and navigation to ensure that the goal covers the entire workflow of completing the reading assignment. I was like, that's great. Yes, we'll keep that. And that it plugged in June 2026 as a placeholder as the end of the school year was June 2026. And then it asked me would you like to adjust the number of trials. It did help guide me in some ways, but not quite as good as the Playground would have. From that, I asked it to break down that goal into measurable objectives and create a self-monitoring checklist for my student. So that I or the teacher could go through the checklist. Now, this is a perfect example -- and I left it this way -- of how what was generated needs to be checked. Because some of these buttons are not correct. The zoom, it says use yellow button. There's two yellow buttons on here. One with a plus, one with a minus. Which one do I use? Find info, use arrows. What arrows? So we definitely need to make sure we double check our output before it comes. But this was generated. I also asked it to generate a quick guide. And again, it says that the yellow buttons are on the top. We can see from the picture here those yellow buttons are not on the top. So I would need to double check and adapt this to make sure it is correct. But it did generate this with a session tracker so that I could track what my student was doing or the teacher could check with an independent, prompted, or a verbal cue what they had on that. So this could go on the student's desk and the teacher of record could come by and say, oh, you're using it. And track it during the day. That was just an example of what I used to generate those goals and objectives. I asked it if it could break it down into nine weeks in duration and generate the checklist and the cheat sheet. So you can take it further from there and generate lesson plans from the objectives. I do that quite often. I like doing that. You are, again, limited by your free version or your imagination. You can ask it to do a lot of things and it does quite a bit. >>Belinda: Absolutely. Just when you think about that example, just remember how throughout that whole process you can be brainstorming. You can be adding additional information that can be helpful. You can keep improving the way that you're developing those things out and you can use it for a lot of different practical purposes. Just always remember that you need to check everything, as we did say. >>Donna: And we did put another check in here for accessibility check. As we go through, you can run your accessibility extensions. There's some built into Microsoft as well as into Google. For example, Grackle is the Google one. With the caveat you need to put your eyes on it because that Grackle checked it off as being appropriate but we did not have the alt text that was appropriate for that picture. >>Belinda: So I'm not going to spend a long time on this but I do want to just make the distinction. This is a court case that came out that kind of talks about the difference between accommodations and workarounds. For us it's remembering it's one thing to use AI as adults who have already gone through and obtained our education, compared to students who are learning actual skills. We want to be careful when we're working with students on different tools and using tools to provide accommodations and differentiate and things like that, we want to be really careful that we're not accidentally creating a workaround that allows us to not focus on providing the instruction and practice that's necessary. This court case was on a different disability in dyslexia but the student was using complex technological workarounds. It's always going to be our job as educators to teach those skills. So just keeping an eye on how we are balancing that, that's just kind of a word of caution as we talk through all of these amazing options that we have now. I think this last quote that I have from the Perkins School for the Blind said AI should augment, not replace essential skills. >>Donna: I think that really just ties into all of our technology. That it really is a tool that is not a replacement for learning those essential skills. So differentiating instruction. >>Belinda: There are so many options out there now. Donna and I could sit here with you all day long but we only get an hour with you so we're going to move through some of these ideas quickly and leave you with a handout with some of those links to explore the options. A way to use AI for differentiation. It's easy to have AI adapt different reading selections. You can tell it you want a specific grading level or you can explain you want simplified vocabulary. Kind of like the example that we had in the chat earlier about making that language more appropriate. So that just gives you so many options that we didn't use to have for differentiation. You can make things be in more one sensory modality, more visual, more auditory, more kinesthetic. You can apply universal design for learning principles. Also, there's a high-leverage practice GPT out there that we have on your handout that allows you to align what you're doing in your instruction with the different high-leverage practices from the cedar center through the council of exceptional children. So there's a lot out there. One example I love is Diffit. You can trial it and then you have to pay a little money. It has a resource -- actually we're going to skip that because I think it would take us too long. Thank you. It has a resource library with pre-made activities. You can create activities, add images, change it to another language. You can adapt it for someone who has low vision. And it's really easy to share. Again, I have a ton of examples if we had all day long with you. One example, this is just vocabulary matching for what could be like a transition type of activity. It's all about different aspects of the federal application for financial aid and all the tools that you need to learn. But it creates new things very effortlessly and then it also is really good at differentiation. We can move to the next slide. >>Belinda: There's one for students that you can use for your students and there's ones for educators. It allows -- one strength I find is it has a lot of different ways for giving feedback that can be really helpful. It also is really good at creating data sheets. You could have that be your progress monitoring, if you don't have another one at your school that you like. It's also really good at problem solving and looking for patterns. Everyone says one of the strengths of AI is looking for patterns. So looking for patterns in that data. AbleSpace is another one that does a lot. This can be somewhere where you get your caseload. You can have your data sheets. You can list out your accommodations. You can have your goals and objectives and it creates effortlessly, once you put in the information you want, it creates a lot of different options. So I have an example here of data sheet for identifying colors, I think is what it was doing. And just different levels of that. Again, once you start playing around with it, you can make it your own. It offers you a lot of options. >>Donna: Our next section is student empowerment. How can we empower our students to appropriately use AI as an assistive tool. Because it can be such a powerful tool for them in all of the ECC areas, really, because if we're looking at AI as something that's in our environment all the time. Because people forget that our friends who must not be named because they would take over things on my desktop right now, beginning with an S or beginning with an A, our friends, when you call their name, they respond to you. Yes, that person. The other is on our phones. Most of my house is set up through our ALEXA person and we talk to her quite often of adjust the lights. Adjust the temperature. Remind me to do this. Remind me to do that. How long do I put this on in the oven at what temperature? So you could see how our students could, outside of the academics, leverage AI to be tools, not only for their writing and their research, but for their independence. If you're using it outside for any of those other core curriculums, drop that into the chat. >>Belinda: Any area on the ECC. If you can think about how either you're using or how you could use it. >>Donna: We want to empower the student to match the AI to the task. Encourage choice-making. Provide -- where the AI could be used to help them with guided practice, review, and refinement. If there's something they're having a hard time doing, they can review. It becomes a study buddy for them because it can generate unlimited numbers of practice. Leveraging that as their study buddy or as their study partner can be quite powerful. >>Belinda: Absolutely. One group that's been doing a lot with special education and AI, they're called AI for Education. I like this model. I like it for adults as well as our students. It basically is teaching how to write a good prompt. It's called the five S model because everything starts with an S. You need to set the scene by telling your AI exactly what role you want them to play. You need to be specific about what you want to do and give it the details it needs to do so. You want to simplify your language. And so make it very clear but without making things too complex. Tell it how you want the output to be structured. Like, I want to see this as a quiz. I want to see this as a list of bullets. I want to see this as a fun activity. Like the example for using AI to make things more fun, to make boring lessons more fun. Finally, you need to share feedback with it. It's an iterative process so you may not get what you want the first time but you need to keep asking questions and refine. I think this five S model is good for all of us, as well as it's something you can teach your students. This is an example of a study that was out on creating prompt frames using this five S model. They have three different levels of differentiation here. So the first one has a specific example. But the blank is every S. S for be specific, S for simplify your language. Then the second one is more specific. Instead of just saying "set the scene," says who should the AI be pretending to be? And be specific. What do you want? What level? How do you want your information? And the third example is differentiated with choices for who the role is, what you want them to do, et cetera. So it's different ways that you can get students involved and you can adapt this for whatever activity you're looking at for your student. >>Donna: Someone in the chat just said that their student is using NotebookLM which leads us into NotebookLM. >>Belinda: Thank you for that great segue. NotebookLM can differentiate by creating, making things audio, video. Creating a mind map. It can do the flash cards. There was something new it was doing the other day since I put this example on here. One thing I also really like about it, especially for people who are more nervous about interacting with AI, with your NotebookLM, you create a specific notebook and it only pulls off of the things you upload. You don't have to be as worried about am I going to -- even some of the concerns about bias and things like that, you're only feeding it what you're feeding it, so this gives you a little more control and better boundaries with what you are dealing with. I think that can be a good feature for a lot of people. You can create all kinds of different notebooks and generate these different activities. Yes, thank you for that example. >>Donna: Yes. I completely forgot to put one of my favorite examples of independent student use. And that is FS companion. If you have a student using JAWS or learning JAWS, there is an AI built in right into JAWS or you can use it on your computer separate of JAWS -- >>Belinda: And the link is in your handout. >>Donna: And you can put questions in there and say how do I, what key command do I -- and it is specifically for JAWS. So that gives you a way to find answers when you have forgotten a command or when your student is away from you and needs to look up a command. They can look it up through FS Companion. >>Belinda: It's amazing. Natural Reader is another one I like as far as differentiation and is something your student could also use as well. You could copy and paste text. You could go to a website. You could upload a document. And it can create all these different versions for you to interact with the reading. Whether you wanted to listen to it. Whether you need to read it a certain way. In this case, I put in a website -- and it has a ton of different voices you can choose from. At the bottom of the screen it shows how the sentence that it's reading is also highlighted word by word and has a lot of different settings that you can change. I really enjoy using that one as well. Goblin is another one I think is fun. So this first one -- I'll be the first one to say I'm a horrible cook, even as an adult. I can definitely take advantage of this chef scenario that it has. So basically you write down any of the ingredients you have in your house. You can also include any dietary constraints. Like I'm vegetarian, so I can put that in. It will tell you ideas of what you can cook. Again, like anything else you probably want to check that that is accurate. Especially when you're thinking about teaching ECC skills and independent living and things like that. That's a fun way to explore and come up with new ideas. And the next example from Goblin I super love -- >>Donna: Which is my favorite. I adore this because I have a hard time with tone. >>Belinda: Basically, you can copy and paste something you received from someone. Something you're about to send out to someone but you're counting to ten first. It will give you an idea of what the tone is. I think this can be really, really helpful for so many things. Like for, you know, interacting with your teachers to, you know, even in the future with looking at job training and things like that. It's such a niche and important social skill and I love how this gives you practice and feedback. >>Donna: And there are a lot of students that need to learn that skill of what tone is this going to send or what impression is this going to send? If you send this e-mail right now to your teacher, how are they -- how could they perceive it as being abrupt or, you know, what tone does it send for them? I think it's a very good judge for them to use. Transition is next. If you're using any AI for transition, go ahead and drop those in the chat. >>Belinda: If you go back one slide and think about those key areas, post-secondary success for our students in, it's independent living, training education and employment. Of course there are more domains than that but those are the ones that legally for our transition planning we know we have to focus to look at. Even if you're not already using this, go ahead and just kind of brainstorm how you could potentially use it. This is a note given to me recently by a smart person to just remember that even when we're talking about transition, we're talking about all of the transitions that our students go through. From early years. Don't think that, oh, I can't use AI in transition planning until they're age 14 because that's when we start thinking about it. Even the slide where we were talking about providing choices for your students and how they can use some of these tools themselves. Like all of those opportunities to promote, you know, autonomy and self-determination. And even just career exploration. Like one of the Diffit examples that was already something set up that I found in their resource library was like a basic practice opportunity for job interview skills, which we know our students need. So, again, thinking about how even as we're looking towards the future and promoting skills that are good for transition, looking at how we can do that. So this next slide. >>Donna: They can use this in that transition period. If we're looking at getting our students advocating for themselves or they want to achieve something through self-advocacy, how do they approach the person that they're advocating with? How do they start that conversation? What things do they need to practice. They could use their AI as a partner to practice that self-advocacy and practice what they're going to say to the employer, to the teacher, to the peer. They could practice those things in a very safe environment. >>Belinda: Absolutely. And this last slide, it's another example of MyLens AI, which is a mind mapping, brainstorming tool. Another one we always recommend, especially for use with screen readers, is called MindView, which is also in your handout. But this MyLens AI, I didn't even give it a good prompt. I think I literally put those three core areas in and it generated all these different ways that we could -- and I think that's good for us as adults. Because with transition we're so focused on our students while we have them, like our instruction, our goals, progress. But transition involves, you know, so many different people. Like Texas Workforce Commission, you know, families. Just so many different areas that we're interacting with and so many more things that we need to think about that are outside the school environment. And so I think especially like just brainstorming ideas and getting yourself thinking in all those directions can be really helpful. As Donna said earlier, with all of this, you're really just limited by your imagination and your free trials. >>Donna: And MindView is one of my favorites. I used it pretty extensively in graduate school. And it is fully accessible because they built it, not with accessibility as an after thought, but with accessibility as a forethought. So they built the accessibility into the platform as they were going. So a mind map, which for most of our kiddos using screen readers or Braille, mind maps are very, very difficult, if not impossible, to get on the fly. So MindView is a wonderful little tool that is fully accessible to screen readers. And it has some of those AI back and forth planning and brainstorming-type activities built into it. >>Belinda: With that, again, Donna and I could hang out all day talking about AT and AI with you all. But all good things must come to an end. We know that Kaycee is ready and waiting with the code to share with you all. That being said, our handout has both of our e-mail addresses on it. We would love to keep the conversation going and stay in touch with you all and we wish you all the best as you go forth exploring different tools that you could use for yourself and with your students.