"Welcome to the new online home of the Maryland Assistive Technology Network (MATN) This premier professional learning network connects educators, families, and educational leaders engaged in improving learning and teaching through the effective use of assistive and universally accessible technologies in education."
"Recognizing that CVI is the
leading cause of visual impairment among children and cognizant of the need for
highly qualified interventionists, four state deaf-blind projects embarked on a
ten-year collaboration known as the "Cortical Visual Impairment Community of
Practice". The Deaf-Blind Projects from Delaware, Maryland, Vermont, and West
Virginia developed and implemented an innovative and successful professional
development program which trained an interdisciplinary team of "CVI Mentors""
Episode #44 is up for your listening pleasure and boy is it a doozy! It clocks in at just under 42 minutes! Yikes! Episode #44 is kind of a unique episode because it features a recording of a live event. Back on November 14th I was lucky enough to attend the Powering Up with Technology Conference in Prince George's County Maryland. At that conference I presented a session called Alternative Professional Development. I use the term "presented" loosely because, although I was listed as the presenter, the session was more of an integrated brainstorming session. I was more of the moderator for the discussion than a presenter. During the session we tried to outline some of the common problems with staff development happening in public schools and then try to come up with some solutions. During the course of the discussion a bunch of great ideas were mentioned about how to address some of the problems with the typical professional development model. Furthermore, a number of concrete resources are mentioned that can be used to assist students. You can access the entire presentation as generated by the audience here: Alternative Professional Development Presentation from PUWT09.
Episode #46 features another excerpt from the presentation for the Individual Differences in Learning Association in Howard County, Maryland. This excerpt describes WordTalk; a free text-to-speech plug-in for Microsoft Word.
The episode features a bumper from Karen Janowski who is an assistive technology consultant, an assistive technology specialist for a school district in Massachusetts, adjunct faculty member at Simmons College, and school board member in her town. She is also one of the innovators behind the UDLTechToolKit wiki, which contains a plethora of resources useful for differentiating instruction.